RUTILS is a syntactic utilities package for Common Lisp

(that aims to radically simplify the Lisp programmer's life both in the REPL and in large system development)

RUTILS stands for RADICAL-UTILITIES :)

See the announcement.

Read the tutorial for usage details or the quickdocs.

Short history

Originally, RUTILS stood for REASONABLE-UTILITIES, but now I switched to calling them RADICAL-UTILITIES, because they make some uncommon and not generally acceptable choices in terms of style of CL development. Namely:

• Introducing several literal notations for anonymous functions, hash-tables, heredoc-strings etc.
• Adding a lot of abbreviations of long symbols from the CL package
• Having several versions of the same utilities with different names

But, what's more important, they aim to radically simplify Lisp programming in the small (with a special accent on simplifying REPL-driven development).

See the original rationale for REASONABLE-UTILITIES.

The current version is 5.0.0.

Major Features

• "Modern" readtable with support for literal syntax for hash-tables, lambdas and heredoc-strings
• Common macros like WITH-GENSYMS, ONCE-ONLY, EVAL-ALWAYS etc. and other symbol manipulation utilities
• Basic anaphoric macros
• A simple pair data structure and accompanying utilities
• List manipulation utilities
• Hash-table manipulation utilities
• Hash-set manipulation utilities
• Sequence manipulation utilities (including SPLIT-SEQUENCE, or rather, simply SPLIT)
• Array manipulation utilities
• String manipulation utilities
• Tree manipulation utilities
• generic access to elements of any data structure: GENERIC-ELT/?
• ITER macro with keywords support
• generic BIND
• Clojure-style threading macros -> and ->>

Explicitly not supported

The following broad topics are not supported by design:

• Concurrency.

  The reason is not that I consider this not useful or general-purpose enough, but rather, that it's a whole new paradigm, and the scope of RUTILS is too small to comfortably accommodate it.

• Functional paradigm.

  As in the above, it's as well a whole other paradigm. It has a limited, but reasonable support in CL. Other features should be unified in it's own package, and maybe RUTILS can serve as a model for such package or even accommodate it in the future.

• Advanced collections are as well a separate area in CS, so it requires a lot of effort to maintain and develop a comprehensive package in it.

  Look at FSET and CL-CONTAINERS for such things.

• MOP. MOP abstraction layer is a CDR and it is as well an essential part of CL. It is implemented and well supported by CLOSER-MOP.

Technical notes

Dependencies

• NAMED-READTABLES
• CLOSER-MOP

Exported features

The following symbols are added to *FEATURES*:

• :split-sequence
• :iter

Organizational notes

(c) 2009-2019, Vsevolod Dyomkin vseloved@gmail.com

See LICENSE for usage permissions. See AUTHORS for credits.