5.20 Alexandria
Alexandria is a collection of portable public domain utilities
that meet the following constraints:
- Utilities, not extensions: Alexandria will not contain conceptual
extensions to Common Lisp, instead limiting itself to tools and utilities
that fit well within the framework of standard ANSI Common Lisp.
Test-frameworks, system definitions, logging facilities, serialization
layers, etc. are all outside the scope of Alexandria as a library, though
well within the scope of Alexandria as a project.
- Conservative: Alexandria limits itself to what project members consider
conservative utilities. Alexandria does not and will not include anaphoric
constructs, loop-like binding macros, etc.
- Portable: Alexandria limits itself to portable parts of Common Lisp. Even
apparently conservative and usefull functions remain outside the scope of
Alexandria if they cannot be implemented portably. Portability is here
defined as portable within a conforming implementation: implementation bugs
are not considered portability issues.
- Team player: Alexandria will not (initially, at least) subsume or provide
functionality for which good-quality special-purpose packages exist, like
split-sequence. Instead, third party packages such as that may be "blessed".