Subject: Re: How to split a string (or arbitrary sequence) at each occurrence of a value. From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 09:27:43 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3211954062966885@naggum.net> * Kenny Tilton | hmmm. my dictionary says partition means to divide into parts. if | partition means something else to mathematicians, that's fine, natural | language is like that, but it's a bit harsh to moan about someone using | a word correctly just because someone else took liberties with it. To repeat myself from the article you responded to, since a teenager's attention span is so short: At the very least, it should be called partition-sequence, but even this sounds wrong to me. The more general a name, the more general the functionality it should provide in order to defend usurping the general name. If it only works on sequences and only uses _one_ meaning of a word at the exclusion of another, make it more specific. I posted the first version of the code that got discussed and transmogrified and then renamed into "partition" without any discussion here. It was called "split-sequence" as I recall. The code that they base "partition" on was initially called just "split" and renamed "partition". Bad move. Common Lisp does not have a simple way to import a symbol from a package under another name. This means the connection to a badly chosen name is broken if you choose to rename it. This is all the more reason to be a little careful when you name things very generally. "split" was horrible in that sense, too. I notice in passing that Franz Inc's "aserve" has split-on-character, split-into-words, and split-string functions which all seem overly specific, but which are at leas properly named. ///