On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 9:04 PM, Roland Averkamp roland.averkamp@gmx.de wrote:

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Out of curiosity, plain-odbc seems to use strings a lot, I would assume that foreign string encoding support would be useful for your library. Am I wrong?

You are right, currently this handled in rather simple way. It is assumed that every string is encoded in the native character set. So maybe I should have a look.

It's not possible in CL to tell how strings are encoded. Your library is just using CFFI's default foreign encoding (iso-8859-1 in past versions of CFFI, utf-8 as of 0.10.0).

How about wrapping iconv with CFFI? :-) Ok, just another library ....

That might be a useful addition to Babel.

I do not think Alexandria is useful. Are rotate, shuffle, or random-elt needed?

I've implemented and used random-elt a couple of times in the past, FWIW.

Do you really need make-gensym-list, symbolicate (=(intern (format nil "...." ..) ?

IMHO, those (and others) make the code clearer. YMMV, of course.

Assuming that you find at least some of Alexandria's utilities useful -- say PARSE-BODY -- consider that while these are typically short pieces of code, many deal with subtle details that can go wrong. Getting these from a library that includes a test suite and is shared/used/reviewed by many other programmers sounds like a good idea to me.

To be honest, I'm surprised you haven't complained about trivial-features yet. :-)