Name: Alexandria Licence: Public domain / 1-clause MIT Members: nsiivola, alendvai, mbaringer, rstrandh Repository: svn Trac: yes Description: --- Alexandria is a project and a library.
As a project Alexandria's goal is to reduce duplication of effort and improve portability of Common Lisp code according to its own idiosyncratic and rather conservative aesthetic. What this actually means is open to debate, but each project member has a veto on all project activities, so a degree of conservativism is inevitable.
As a library Alexandria is one of the means by which the project strives for its goals. Alexandia is a collection of portable Public Domain utilities that meet the following constraints:
* Utilities, not extensions: Alexandria will not contain conceptual extensions to Common Lisp, instead limiting itself to tools and utilities that fit well within the framework of standard ANSI Common Lisp. Test-frameworks, system definitions, logging facilities, serialization layers, etc. are all outside the scope of Alexandria as a library, though well within the scope of Alexandria as a project.
* Conservative: Alexandria limits itself to what project members consider conservative utilities. Alexandria does not and will not include anaphoric constructs, loop-like binding macros, etc.
* Portable: Alexandria limits itself to portable parts of Common Lisp. Even apparently conservative and usefull functions remain outside the scope of Alexandria if they cannot be implemented portably. Portability is here defined as portable within a conforming implementation: implementation bugs are not considered portability issues.
* Team player: Alexandria will not (initially, at least) subsume or provide functionality for which good-quality special-purpose packages exist, like SPLIT-SEQUENCE. Instead, third party packages such as that may be "blessed". --- Cheers,
-- Nikodemus Schemer: "Buddha is small, clean, and serious." Lispnik: "Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs."