How would you categorize STRING-CASE ?
Opened this issue · 4 comments
Please note that I am not (yet!) nominating this library for inclusion, due to the lack of obvious categorisation.
It exports one symbol, similar to the cl:case macro, for matching string literals; and I must admit that it is quite a low-level library, and most folks these days would probably complain that it's not a complete reimplementation of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
In my entirely non-authoritative opinion, it seems like it belongs in "Language extensions" alongside libraries like trivia.
"Language extensions" seems to be where control flow constructs are located, and this seems like it's intended to be a control flow construct (rather than a text processing routine).
I do wonder why they chose string literals and not keywords, but that's a different question entirely!
it seems like it belongs in "Language extensions"
agreed.
But of course, we can create and re-arrange categories.
ps: for a simple version, see str:string-case
ps: for a simple version, see str:string-case
link (pinned to one specific commit, to avoid breaking when you update the repository)
I do wonder why they chose string literals and not keywords, but that's a different question entirely!
The more I've used it, the more it seems to me to simply be an intermediate primitive, similar to how implementors might lean upon cl:tagbody for implementing more complicated constructs; and for an intermediate, it's nice to avoid the extra code cruft of dealing with packages. I do realise that if it's an interface macro, then keywords are nice, because they save one character; and if you're really gone golfing, let any symbol get used, with some keyword options in the switch form [i.e., some keyword within the form immediately following the string-case symbol] to allow for optional including of qualified names instead of only the cl:symbol-name.