Suggestion: allow docstrings in defonce like in def

Question

When defining vars, we can provide docstrings in between the symbol and the binding. e.g.

(def some-var 
  "this var serves as an example" 
  42)

However, we cannot currently do so with defonce. We must resort to providing metadata manually as follows.

(defonce 
  ^{:doc "this var serves as another example"}
  other-example nil)

It would be nice to be able to use docstrings like we can in def, defn, etc. in a future release of Clojure.

Answer 1

We have an old ticket for this that has been through several rounds of patches, it's actually surprisingly tricky to get right. :)

https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/CLJ-1148