[sls]

It's useful because the read-string in core is passing a string to the reader, essentially like an eval[1].

The edn namespace is for Extensible Data Notation[2], and exports functions for reading an object from a stream and from a string without passing it to the lisp reader.[3]

[1] https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/read-string [2] https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.edn [3] https://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.edn-api.html