why does clj -X pass in options as a clojure.lang.Symbol?

Question

something i found counterintuitive recently is that clj -X passes in options as a symbols. so for example i have this function:
(defn test2 [opts] (println (type (:file opts))))
when i run clj like this:

-> clj -X some.package/test2 :file some-dir/file1

clojure.lang.Symbol

i would think it would be a string, so i'm curious why it's a symbol.

Answer 1

-X will edn/read-string each argument