I think 'If silently is nil or false, raise an exception if it fails, else return the value of silently.' is sufficient

As noted in a thread on the Clojure ML, you can pass a known value in the second argument position to detect a delete that failed:

(clojure.java.io/delete-file some-file :not-deleted)

This returns true on success and :not-deleted on failure.

However the docstring could be better worded to make that intention clear. Perhaps:

Delete file f. Return true if it succeeds. If silently is nil or false, raise an exception if it fails, else return the value of silently.
This allows you to detect whether the delete succeeded without catching an exception by passing a non-true truthy value as the second argument.

Comment made by: atkaaz

I kinda just realized it affects all versions since and including 1.2, because it appears that its implementation was the same since then.

If it's not meant to return the result of the delete, maybe it should specifically return nil and/or the doc say something?