Thanks Eli. I'm happy you recognize the issue. I did write my own string-trim-both function using Racket's regexp as follows: (define (string-trim-both string) (cadr (regexp-match #px"[\\s]*(\\S+)[\\s]*" string))) May not be the best, but it works. Even though it's easy to implement, my issue was why it wasn't included. I guess I'm just used to such utilities functions being provided for free in the language I usually work in: Ruby. I was surprised that I had to either 1) roll my own, or 2) require the srfi-13. Thanks for you help. -- Chad <div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Eli Barzilay <<a href="mailto:eli@barzilay.org" target="_blank">eli@barzilay.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">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? </div></div>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: <a href="http://barzilay.org/" target="_blank">http://barzilay.org/</a> Maze is Life! </blockquote></div>