Common Lisp Utilities

The Common Lisp Utilities cliki page served as a collection of useful CL utilities. The idea to create a bigger package out of the small suggested packages here got momentum. You can see the result at cl-utilities. The discussion below is retained for historic purposes.

Motivated by the benefits of discussing design issues in public, possibly utilities "that everyone writes" could be canonicalized and (semi-)standardized.

PARTITION (deprecated)
SPLIT-SEQUENCE (supersedes PARTITION)
EXTREMUM
READ-DELIMITED (name is up to debate) - reads a 'line' delimited by the specified character, optionally into a pre-allocated buffer
EXPT-MOD (name is up to debate) - calculates (mod (expt a b) m)
COLLECTING for collecting things into one or more lists
WITH-UNIQUE-NAMES executes a series of forms with variables bound to fresh, uninterned symbols
GENSYMLET binds fresh, uninterned symbols to values
ROTATE-BYTE bit-rotates a byte
ARGUMENT-LIST (name, purpose, raison d'etre up for debate) returns the arglist of a function - useful for editor interfaces, documentation generators etc. Code could be stolen from ILISP/SLIME/clocc-port for implementations that don't have their own.
SHALLOW-COPY-ARRAY
WITH-DIRECTORY-ITERATOR - does what DIRECTORY should do. (You get this and more with CL-FAD)
COMPOSE composes functions.
Also worth looking at PARSE-NUMBER
DECIMAL-NUMBER

Worth scanning Scheme SRFIs for ideas? Many are just reimplementing features in CL anyway, but some are interesting. Try to avoid NIH syndrome! The SRFI process seems to work quite well...

These utilities could be candidates for the CLRFI process.

Might it be a good idea to collect these all into a single cCLan (and Debian) package, rather than having various ones (ie. split-sequence)? At least, while it's still fairly small. -- Matthew Danish

There's now a project to collect these, as Matthew Danish wished. It's called cl-utilities.

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Probably a stupid question: What is the relation to the Common Lisp Utilities on SourceForge.net?

Not a stupid question, but: completely unrelated.

Pages in this topic: cl-utilities COMPOSE DECIMAL-NUMBER EXPT-MOD EXTREMUM READ-DELIMITED SHALLOW-COPY-ARRAY shelisp SPLIT-SEQUENCE WITH-DIRECTORY-ITERATOR WITH-UNIQUE-NAMES

Also linked from: text

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