So I ran across this while going through my morning catchup routine and thought it could do with some clearing up.
The part of the post I'm actually interested is this.
When Haskell can compete on those types of problems, it'll be easier to induce people to learn it. (Same with CL, my fav language....)
Now, bonus points for proclaiming CL as being his favorite language, but minus 10 billion for continuing the meme
One of the examples given is "I have a bunch of files, and I want to rename them all according to some pattern." and as it so happens translate-pathname[2] makes this wonderfully simple.
(defun rename-files (from to)
(dolist (file (directory from))
(rename-file file (translate-pathname file from to))))
And thats it, 3 lines of code, or for our simple testing purposes
(defun show-rename-files (from to)
(dolist (file (directory from))
(format t "Renaming ~A to ~A~%" file
(translate-pathname file from to))))
(show-rename-files "/usr/share/pixmaps/*.xpm" "/usr/share/pixmaps/backup-*.xpm")
The funny thing is that this isn't secret knowledge but is pulled straight from the Hyperspec (see the examples).
----
[1]: Please note, I said 'writing' them, not 'creating a 2k binary' of them, please people CL /= Unix.
[2]: Granted, the behavior of translate-pathname isn't specified in detail by the spec but that doesn't mean we cannot use it.
This post brought to you by Lispworks 5.1, clisp 2.41 and SBCL 1.0.12
