x, y - numbers -- only if x and y appear together?

[seancorfield]

It seems fairly common to see x & xs in destructuring where x is some arbitrary "thing" and xs is a sequence of such "things".

Yet the guide suggests x and y are typically numbers.

Perhaps we can refine this: x and y are likely to be numbers when both are present, such as [x y] when a coordinate system is implied, but x standing alone tends to mean a arbitrary thing in a lot of cases, and especially when used with xs.

I don't have a specific suggestion to improve the wording but wanted to bounce this off the editorial team to see if we can come up with something better here?

[bbatsov]

@seancorfield I totally agree. I had originally borrowed this from https://clojure.org/dev/contrib_howto#_coding_guidelines and I didn't bother to extend the explanations, but I think this would be beneficial.