Subject: Re: How to split a string (or arbitrary sequence) at each occurrence of a value.
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 11:16:32 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3211960591334243@naggum.net>

* Christophe Rhodes <csr21@cam.ac.uk>
| I can't help but be slightly irritated by this, I'm afraid, as I noted
| at the time the conspicuous absence of certain people (not just Erik)
| in the debate about the splitting function and its naming, at times
| when I thought they might well have something to contribute.

  Where did this debate occur?  I have just stuffed a private archive of a
  _lot_ of news into a huge database, and cannot find any discussion of the
  name "partition" in this forum.  If you go away and make up your own
  community and you do something stupid and somebody complains about it, it
  is fairly bad taste to blame the people _you_ left behind for not taking
  part in your discussion.  This is one of the reasons I do not think those
  mini-communities are doing any good.  You need a large number of people
  to weed out the silly ideas that look good to everyone in a small group.

| Nevertheless, the question is probably more "so what are we going to do
| about it?" Well, that's a good question... my personal attitude at this
| point right now is "why bother?"

  Yeah, why use something that is so badly named?  So, who cares?

  As I have indicated, I think splitting strings and creating huge amounts
  of garbage during parsing is bad software design.  The incessant copying
  of characters that plague most parsers is _the_ source of bad performance.

///