[alexandria-devel] reverting patch

[Tamas Papp]

Hi,

I have been trying to reach Nikodemus Siivola for a while but didn't
get a response, so I thought I would write here hoping that someone
can help me.

Nikodemus admitted my "generic MEAN and MEDIAN, new function
DISPLACE-ARRAY" patch to Alexandria 11 days ago.  This was meant to be
an initial patch, followed by others, with the final goal of making
mean, median and variance generic.  The first patch dealt with MEAN
and MEDIAN.

I would like to ask that this patch is removed from Alexandria for the
time being, for the following two reasons:

1. The generic variance I wrote would not support the :BIASED keyword,
in fact, only "unbiased" variance makes sense in certain situations.
Since :BIASED T is the default, this would break existing code in a
silent manner, which is not desirable.

2. The new function DISPLACE-ARRAY is badly designed: the keyword
defaults handle what turns out to be a rarely used corner case for me.
I would rather keep the old functionality, already present in
CL-NUM-UTILS.

I am sorry for the confusion.  I think it is best if I experiment
within my own libraries for a while before re-addressing these issues.
I wonder if someone could revert the patch, preferably soon, so that
the next release of Quicklisp would contain Alexandria without my
code.

Best,

Tamas