Abram Hindle <abram.hindle@softwareprocess.us> writes:
I was running into problems with performance with SBCL. I want to read huge CSV files and convert ASCII representations of floats to floats.
A. what's an effecient way to convert a string to a float
Here is a good discussion: http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/92d22492f4c93e72/bbf23b3aa5b44698?hl=en&lnk=st&q=lisp+read+string+to+float#bbf23b3aa5b44698
B. what's an effecient way to read lines from a file
Different ways for "slurping" a file, including line by line, with benchmarks: http://www.emmett.ca/~sabetts/slurp.html
C. what's an effecient way to split substrings from a string (I don't need to keep them around after I throw away the line)
Depending on the complexity of the splitting, use either split-sequence (http://www.cliki.net/SPLIT-SEQUENCE) or cl-ppcre (http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/) - the latter is very fast. -- Dimitre Liotev