[alexandria-devel] SOMETIMES

[Nikodemus Siivola]

On 1/17/08, Tobias C. Rittweiler <tcr at freebits.de> wrote:

> I'd also like to propose the following addition:

I'm still on the fence re MAYBECALL, but this one I say no to. IMO the amount
of symbols already exported is possibly too large, and unless you see this
regularly, this is going to be a lot slower to read then

 (lambda (x)
   (if (test x) <then> <else>))

and not that much better to write.

I suspect there is also a stylistic issue of "when to LAMBDA and when to DEFUN
a generator" here. There are already borderline items in Alexandria
like OF-TYPE,
which despite the amusingly punny name and hopefully obvious meaning is maybe
_too_ trivial.

A word on my logic here: Alexandria wants to be widely used, and make it easier
to not just write, but also to read CL programs. Hence, I strongly believe that
symbols exported by Alexandria should fall into the following categories

 * Traditional: ONCE-ONLY, WITH-GENSYMS, etc.

 * Name is sufficient documentation for reading the code. FORMAT-SYMBOL,
   HASH-TABLE-ALIST, LASTCAR, REQUIRED-ARGUMENT, etc. MAYBECALL... maybe. :)

 * Seldom used, but _really_ convenient when you need them. I suspect CALLF
   is one of these, as long as it is use pretty much only for writing modify
   macros, and not instead of them.

There will be exceptions, of course, but SOMETIMES seems like something that
would be applicable in fairly many situations, yet no something you use _all_
the time -- so it's no something that I think we can assume the reader is
already familiar with from other code, and neither is the meaning clear.

(Sorry for rambling.)

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus