[racket] Rationale behind missing string-trim

30 minutes ago, Chad Albers wrote:
> I'm having a long running discussion with my colleagues about the
> practically of scheme.  I've argued that it is, and using Racket
> Scheme to prove my point.  However, on the other side of the debate,
> I've noticed that Racket's string API is missing what I consider to
> be a extremely practical procedure - string-trim.  This procedure is
> actually in srfi 13.  While I can 'require' srfi13, I can't import
> it as is, because sfri-13's procedures overlap Racket's string
> procedures.  I believe Racket's require feature allows me to just
> import those procedures I need from srfi 13, but I find that kind of
> awkward.
> 
> My question is, then, why would such a practical procedure missing
> from Racket's string API?

In no particular order:

* If two libraries provide the same name, you'd only run into problems
  if you `require' both -- otherwise, as Laurent showed, there
  shouldn't be any problems.  If you do need to require both, then you
  can use a prefix or grab only the functionality that you need.

* I don't see a big meta point about the practicality of Racket
  ("Scheme" is trickier to talk about) -- we did have regexp
  operations for a long time now, and as any Perl hacker knows, you
  don't need anything more...  But more seriously it definitely means
  that practicality is important.

* The particular functionality that `string-trim' provides is one that
  can easily be done using regexps.  This is why it wasn't an urgent
  addition.  That's not to say that it's not needed -- and in fact
  this exact point came up recently -- it's just that if the main goal
  is to provide some simpler interface than regexps, then it's not
  clear how such an interface should look.

* As a result of the recent discussion, I've added it, and it will be
  included in the next release.  Also, it just happens that you wrote
  this email just when I was working on that exact function.  (We had
  talked about the general interface to these functions and reached
  some conclusions that slightly change the way it's implemented.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!