Full description
Alexandria is a project and a library.
As a project Alexandria's goal is to reduce duplication of effort and
improve portability of Common Lisp code according to its own
idiosyncratic and rather conservative aesthetic. What this actually
means is open to debate, but each project member has a veto on all
project activities, so a degree of conservativism is inevitable.
As a library Alexandria is one of the means by which the project
strives for its goals. 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".
Packages