[admin] Project application: Alexandria

[Nikodemus Siivola]

Name: Alexandria
Licence: Public domain / 1-clause MIT
Members: nsiivola, alendvai, mbaringer, rstrandh
Repository: svn
Trac: yes
Description:
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Alexandria is a project and a library. 

As a project Alexandria's goal is to reduce duplication of effort and
improve portability of Common Lisp code according to its own
idiosyncratic and rather conservative aesthetic. What this actually
means is open to debate, but each project member has a veto on all
project activities, so a degree of conservativism is inevitable.

As a library Alexandria is one of the means by which the project
strives for its goals. Alexandia is a collection of portable Public
Domain utilities that meet the following constraints:

 * Utilities, not extensions: Alexandria will not contain conceptual
   extensions to Common Lisp, instead limiting itself to tools and
   utilities that fit well within the framework of standard ANSI
   Common Lisp. Test-frameworks, system definitions, logging
   facilities, serialization layers, etc. are all outside the scope of
   Alexandria as a library, though well within the scope of Alexandria
   as a project.

 * Conservative: Alexandria limits itself to what project members
   consider conservative utilities. Alexandria does not and will not
   include anaphoric constructs, loop-like binding macros, etc.

 * Portable: Alexandria limits itself to portable parts of Common
   Lisp. Even apparently conservative and usefull functions remain
   outside the scope of Alexandria if they cannot be implemented
   portably. Portability is here defined as portable within a
   conforming implementation: implementation bugs are not considered
   portability issues.

 * Team player: Alexandria will not (initially, at least) subsume
   or provide functionality for which good-quality special-purpose
   packages exist, like SPLIT-SEQUENCE. Instead, third party packages
   such as that may be "blessed".
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Cheers,

  -- Nikodemus              Schemer: "Buddha is small, clean, and serious."
                   Lispnik: "Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs."