What's the convention for using an asterisk at the end of a function name in Clojure and other Lisp dialects?

Question

Note that I\'m not talking about ear muffs in symbol names, an issue that is discussed at Conventions, Style, and Usage for Clojure Constants? and How is the `*var-name*` naming

Answer 1

In Clojure it basically means "foo* is like foo, but somehow different, and you probably want foo". In other words, it means that the author of that code couldn't come up with a better name for the second function, so they just slapped a star on it.