Thanks, drallison. Generally speaking I agree, LOC alone is not a great metric of code quality, though it does roughly map to fewer places for bugs to be intro

Thanks, drallison. Generally speaking I agree, LOC alone is not a great metric of code quality, though it does roughly map to fewer places for bugs to be introduced when coding in the large, which is rarely a bad thing (though irrelevant for something like this). In this case, I decided to implement it in a lisp after noticing that Pike's algorithm worked by consuming a character at a time off of both the pattern and the input text, lending itself naturally to a functional recursive implementation. Pike's version in C does this by advancing pointers, but it spoke equally well to an idiomatic car/cdr approach in a lisp (the recur/first/rest pattern you see in matchhere).