Re: Blessing cl functions

[Miles Bader]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2003 at 06:33:37PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     I could do that, especially if it would mean that the other mapping
>     functions (maplist, mapl, mapcan, mapcon, some, every, notany, and
>     notevery) got in too. None of those have keyword arguments, anyway.
> 
> I don't like the idea of adding all of them, but a few of them would
> be ok.

The last time I looked at this, BTW, the main annoyance with adding cl-style
multiple-sequence mapping operators seemed to be the interaction with support
for mapping over non-list sequences.  The current implementation just hands
off iteration to a dedicated function for each sequence type, which doesn't
work so well for multiple sequences (because each can be a different type).

One could get around this by saying that mapping operators only work
efficiently when all sequence arguments are of the same type, and in other
cases convert additional sequence types to the type of the first before
proceeding.

-Miles
-- 
"I distrust a research person who is always obviously busy on a task."
   --Robert Frosch, VP, GM Research