Back a while, some people expressed interest in collecting together
the utilities that everyone writes, ideally in a well-designed
form. Now that I have caught up with the world a little, I thought I'd
give this idea another prod.
There are two things that are near the front of my mind on this
subject; one is the function that was tentatively named "extremum",
which would return the `morally-smallest' element of a sequence under
a certain key. There is a description of extremum at cliki, but I
should remind the audience of the open questions, including: what
happens if the sequence is empty, so it's not yet a specification.[1]
The other that has been mentioned is a non-consing version of
read-line, motivated by the use of read-line to process line-based
files line-by-line. Careful thought on the semantics probably need to
be done here.
I'm sure that there's more that could be discussed, but this is
probably enough to be going on with.
Cheers,
Christophe
[1] partition also has a page there, though since it's editable by
anyone anywhere it shouldn't be viewed as the canonical place, I suppose.
--
Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL +44 1223 510 299
http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/ (defun pling-dollar
(str schar arg) (first (last +))) (make-dispatch-macro-character #\! t)
(set-dispatch-macro-character #\! #\$ #'pling-dollar)