Hacker News Reader

Comment by negativeview | Hacker News Reader

That's quite interesting! I tried to learn Lisp a while back and found the string handling to be horrible, and it's such a huge part of modern development.

It sounds like there's someone with a lot of skill working to fix exactly this.

Now, do I have time to look into Lisp again...

View on HN

out of curiosity, what did you found horrible about string handling?

So I just looked up Common Lisp string handling and none of it looks familiar. It's possible what I was trying to use before wasn't Common Lisp. It's also possible I was trying to learn from a site that was just doing a horrible job of it. It's possible things have gotten much much better since I last tried to learn it.

Whatever the cause, I was under the impression that you essentially had to treat strings as lists of characters and that there really weren't any built-in functions to handle strings as strings. It seems that's wrong at least in modern day.

Strings are sequences and functions that work on sequences work on strings as well. So getting substrings etc. is all possible.

I've had very little problems operating on strings in Common Lisp (all I missed was starts-with and ends-with functions), could you give some concrete examples so that I might help you?

I can't now because it was years ago I was having problems. I'm starting to think that it was a different Lisp and not Common Lisp I was looking at, too. Too long ago to remember for sure.

Strings are a simple-array of characters and functions that work sequences work on strings (ej. remove). They are complemented with a some string specific functions like string-equal, string-trim, string-upcase, etc. It has been that way for at least 20 years. It might have been that the site was doing a horrible job at explaining it.

Try Clojure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com