On 8/31/10 Aug 31 -3:33 PM, Nikodemus Siivola wrote:
On 31 August 2010 22:03, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
On 31 August 2010 12:55, Nikodemus Siivola nikodemus@random-state.net wrote:
Exporting random internal utilities from ASDF is a terrible idea, IMO.
The utilities are not completely random. I use them, and other people use them.
The word was ill-chosen. What I ment was that they appear to have very little with the rest of ASDF looking from outside in.
Robert's point regarding lack of portable pathname wrangling tools is also well made.
Looking at the export list the following are the ones that "look random" to me -- having little obvious relation to res of ASDF:
#:aif #:appendf #:coerce-name #:ends-with #:length=n-p #:read-file-forms #:remove-keys #:remove-keyword #:split-string #:while-collecting
Of these, I would say that COERCE-NAME, SPLIT-STRING, and probably READ-FILE-FORMS are actually not random. COERCE-NAME is something like SYMBOL-NAME for ASDF: SYMBOL-NAME is /not/ how you want to look up an ASDF system. SPLIT-STRING is used for filename wrangling.
READ-FILE-FORMS is used to wrangle configuration files. It's a borderline case.
The others seem more like programming utilities that could be dispensed with. I think we're probably stuck with AIF and APPENDF, but WHILE-COLLECTING and some of the others might be safely dispensable.
cheers, r