On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 1:17 AM, Daniel Herring <dherring@tentpost.com> wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2011, Liam Healy wrote:
(defun mkstr (&rest args) "Make a string out of the printed representations of the arguments." (with-output-to-string (s) (dolist (a args) (princ a s))))
Isn't that the same as (defun mkstr (&rest args) "Make a string out of the printed representations of the arguments." (format nil "~{~A~}" args)) ?
Is this complicated enough to be a standalone, documented function?
- Daniel
I think your form of the function would indeed do the same thing. I don't think complexity is a point on which a utility should be judged, but rather how useful it is, essentially, how much people have to repeat its functionality (see for instance ensure-symbol, already in alexandria, which is simpler than this). I use mkstr all the time, and imagine it would be useful to others. And, since symbolicate is just the symbol form of the output, it seems that it's useful to others. Liam