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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: How to split a string (or arbitrary sequence) at each occurrence of  a value.
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From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Message-ID: <3211954062966885@naggum.net>
Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway
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Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 09:27:43 GMT
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* Kenny Tilton
| hmmm. my dictionary says partition means to divide into parts. if
| partition means something else to mathematicians, that's fine, natural
| language is like that, but it's a bit harsh to moan about someone using
| a word correctly just because someone else took liberties with it. 

  To repeat myself from the article you responded to, since a teenager's
  attention span is so short:

  At the very least, it should be called partition-sequence, but even this
  sounds wrong to me.
  
  The more general a name, the more general the functionality it should
  provide in order to defend usurping the general name.  If it only works
  on sequences and only uses _one_ meaning of a word at the exclusion of
  another, make it more specific.  I posted the first version of the code
  that got discussed and transmogrified and then renamed into "partition"
  without any discussion here.  It was called "split-sequence" as I recall.
  The code that they base "partition" on was initially called just "split"
  and renamed "partition".  Bad move.

  Common Lisp does not have a simple way to import a symbol from a package
  under another name.  This means the connection to a badly chosen name is
  broken if you choose to rename it.  This is all the more reason to be a
  little careful when you name things very generally.  "split" was horrible
  in that sense, too.  I notice in passing that Franz Inc's "aserve" has
  split-on-character, split-into-words, and split-string functions which
  all seem overly specific, but which are at leas properly named.

///