From ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: string assembly in lisp?? help??
Date: 1999/03/20
Message-ID: <3130915884917754@naggum.no>#1/1
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* Sunil Mishra <smishra@whizzy.cc.gatech.edu>
| This is exactly what I had thought when I had first tried this in
| lispworks 3.2.  Alas, what I got was
| 
| CL-USER 6 > (make-array 10 :element-type 'character)
| #(NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL)

  ouch.  (I'm glad it has been fixed later.)

| Hardly a string...  Which had me pretty confused and led me to believe that
| 'character was not the right type to use.  (I probably should have asked,
| but I was much more of a newbie back then than I am now, and this bit of
| information became a decontextualized fact over time.)

  stuff like this is why I think programmers who don't read specifications
  learn bad habits: failure to get what you expect must be investigated and
  the culprit must actually be _found_: either you did something wrong, or
  somebody else did something wrong.  "oh, that didn't work, let's try
  something else" is good if you deal with the physical world and people,
  but when you're dealing with computers and programming languages, it's
  the _last_ property of the physical world I want to imitate.  if an
  expectation doesn't come true, either the expectation is wrong, you made
  a mistake in preparation for it, or there is a flaw in the system.  if
  you don't do the work necessary to figure out which of these three is the
  right one, you have 1/3 chance of getting it right by luck.  I think the
  most important desideratum for a programmer is an _unwillingness_ just to
  try something until it works -- a good programmer needs to know _why_.

| Thanks for clearing things up.

  sure.

#:Erik