[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[Daniel Weinreb]

On 1/21/11 6:01 AM, Svante Carl v. Erichsen wrote:
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> Hi!
>
> I should call it string-conc, conc-string, or conc->string.  I should
> not expect from first sight that either, string+ or string*, would
> concatenate.  From those names, it also would seem surprising that
> they can take any sequences, not just strings, as arguments.
>
> I see the main merit of creating such a function of reduced generality
> in that you can pass it around as a simple #'string-conc instead of
> (lambda (&rest sequences) (apply #'concatenate 'string sequences)).
>
> Best wishes
>
> Svante
>
>
> Am 21.01.2011 11:20, schrieb Tord Romstad:
>> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:22 PM, karol skocik<karol.skocik at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Some time ago, I tried to communicate on IRC channel about a very,
>>> very simple addition:
>>> string+, which is obviously a nice, small name for (apply
>>> #'concatenate 'string strings).
>> Pet peeve: string+ is a *small* name, but it is not a *nice* name for
>> string concatenation. Additive notation for string concatenation is
>> extremely ugly and counter-intuitive for anyone who has studied
>> mathematics. It is extremely annoying that C++, JavaScript and a few
>> other languages have adopted this convention. Additive notation is
>> normally used for commutative operations, which string concatenation
>> is not.
>>
>> There already is a standard notation for string concatenation, from
>> long before the days of computers and programming languages.
>> Mathematically, strings under concatenation is the free monoid
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoid) over the set of all available
>> characters. The single binary operation in a non-commutative monoid is
>> nearly always written as multiplication. And even if you don't know
>> anything about abstract algebra, multiplicative notation makes much
>> more sense: After all, even in elementary high school algebra, abc*de
>> equals abcde, but abc+de does not.
>>
>> Therefore, if you really need a function for string concatenation and
>> want to share it with the world, please name it string*, not string+
>>
>> Tord
>>
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> - -- 
> Svante Carl v. Erichsen
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Our utility library calls it "strcat".  I think string-concat
is probaby better.

Dave Moon established the general ethic on the Lisp
machine of using longer, clearer names in general.
This may be because we were coming off the PDP-10
ITS system, in which many terms were in all caps
and six or fewer characters, which could be fit
into one PDP-10 word using "sixbit" encoding,
and we were particularly sick of short names.
But I don't think it really was because of that.
It was more like "computers are powerful
now and we write programs for people to
read, not to fit into tiny amounts of core".

-- Dan