Re: How to split a string (or arbitrary sequence) at each occurrence of a value.

Subject: Re: How to split a string (or arbitrary sequence) at each occurrence of a value.
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 23:15:29 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3211917326833236@naggum.net>

* Christophe Rhodes
| See <URL:http://ww.telent.net/cliki/PARTITION>, wherein a
| community-discussed function is described in roughly specification-level
| detail, with links to a reference implementation.

* Marco Antoniotti
| I am sorry to be sooo nagging (again) on such a stupid matter. But......
| The name PARTITION is inappropriate.  SPLIT-SEQUENCE is much more
| descriptive of what the function does.

* Tim Moore
| Get over it!

  But "partition" is such a _fantastically_ bad name, especially to people
  who know a bit of mathematical terminology.  Effectively using up that
  name forever for something so totally unrelated to the mathematical
  concept is hostile.  It is like defining a programming language where
  "sin" and "tan" are operations on (in) massage parlor just because the
  designers are more familiar with them than with mathematics.  "Partition"
  is a good name for a string-related function when the _only_ thing you
  think about is strings, or sequences at best.  At the very least, it
  should be called partition-sequence, but even this sounds wrong to me.

  I tend to use :start and :end arguments to various functions instead of
  splitting one string into several, and make sure that functions I write
  accept :start and :end arguments, and that they work with all sequences
  and useful element types, not only strings and characters.

///