4 ms·

PHP.net landing page for string documentation: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.strings.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.strings.php (also available in

by frig 17y ago

PHP.net landing page for string documentation: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.strings.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.strings.php (also available in 7-8 other languages). Note all useful string concepts are one click away, and the documentation allows user commentary (much of which is quite helpful). Common Lisp Hyperspec landing page for Strings: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/16_.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/16_.ht... CMUCL string documentation: http://common-lisp.net/project/cmucl/doc/cmu-user/unicode.html#toc311 http://common-lisp.net/project/cmucl/doc/cmu-user/unicode.ht... SBCL's manual has no "table of contents" item that even mentions strings. Stuff like this matters if you care about accessibility. It should be trivial to google yourself a well-documented list of a given language's standard string functions without a lot of work.

mahmud 17y ago
In Common Lisp, strings are a subtype of Sequences :-) The PHP String library you linked to is appalling. It includes a lot of stuff that shouldn't be squashed together in one "section"; strings, characters, locale management, i18n, cryptography, sequences, generic formatter, currency parsing and formatting, uu(en|de)coding, even fuzzy string matching! Who does this appeal to? no abstraction, no modularity, no visible type hierarchy or any sense of order.
- frig 17y ago
  I wasn't commenting pro-php; the php api design isn't going to win any awards other than popularity. You're not really responding to the point I was raising: poorly-designed or not, php's official site has easily-findable and easily-accessible documentation (which it needs given the quality of the api design); its official central documentation site is well within the range of modern best practices. There's not to my knowledge a comparable common lisp online reference (reference, not tutorial) that's anywhere near as accessible to the beginner or intermediate user (that nebulous phase between getting through a few tutorials and having deep knowledge). These are all excellent resources: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/ http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/ http://docs.python.org/ http://docs.python.org/ http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ http://www.php.net/manual/en/ http://www.php.net/manual/en/ http://clojure.org/Reference http://clojure.org/Reference ...etc., where is the common lisp equivalent that won't look out of place (in terms of contents + organization)? Stuff like this matters for accessibility and usability.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.0/ansicl/ansicl.htm http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.0/ansicl/ansicl... Please tell me which part of it is "inaccessible".
    - frig 17y ago
      Do you notice you just re-linked the hyperspec on Franz instead of Lispwork's site? I thought you'd link to this, which is better: http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.1/doc/contents.htm http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.1/doc/contents.... ...which I'd say is probably the best of the online manuals. But more to the point: There are minor issues with the formatting of the hyperspec no one's bothered fixing. Aside from the lack of a pretty stylesheet and the lack of wiki-style user comments The most obvious is that if I eg go to the Strings or Array section it just gives me a page with a sub-table of contents; it'd be a lot friendlier to have all the Array or String docs on a single html page. This wouldn't even be that hard to implement, and the "moar docs on one page" approach to online docs keeps winning out for a reason (it's easier to find what you're looking for if you only know approximately where it is if you can get everything that might be related on a single page and ctrl-f your way through it; having deeply-nested content is far unfriendlier). I do think the hyperspec is not very well-thought-through as end-user documentation. It mixes levels of concerns that ought to be separate; someone reading documentation with the goal of finding out if there's a built-in function for "split a string delimited by a particular character into a list of strings?" has very different requirements from someone who needs to know how strings are implemented, for example. IMHO the hyperspec tries to do both; it's fine as a nitty-gritty reference but could be improved as a day-to-day programmer's reference. Python's docs are a good example of end-user documentation done right. They have a clearly-delineated split between the language specification ( http://docs.python.org/reference/index.html http://docs.python.org/reference/index.html ) and the standard library specification ( http://docs.python.org/library/index.html http://docs.python.org/library/index.html ) and additional, separate documentation over lower-level aspects of implementation. Each body of documentation is organized for the convenience of its typical user.
      - 17y ago
- ezy 17y ago
  Aaaaaannnd... this is the number two reason Lisp's are not more successful (number one being the syntax, although that is somewhat related). Instead of helping to solve your problem, advocates (and the reference documents, "tutorials") want to engage in academic chest beating exercises. How hard is it just to acknowledge, just a teeny bit, that PHP is more successuful than Lisp for real reasons -- not just because everyone but you is an idiot. That's nice that you think the string library is appalling. Perhaps it is -- but jesus, how do you even get work done with an attitude like that? Do you write everything you do from scratch? Go write a graduate paper on the perfect string library and others can get real work done.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    Instead of helping to solve your problem .. What problem are you trying to solve? Look at the manual and search Cliki to find what you need. http://www.cliki.net/index http://www.cliki.net/index I really wish programmers would stop acting so helpless and fetch for themselves.

by frig 17y ago

mahmud 17y ago

In Common Lisp, strings are a subtype of Sequences :-) The PHP String library you linked to is appalling. It includes a lot of stuff that shouldn't be squashed together in one "section"; strings, characters, locale management, i18n, cryptography, sequences, generic formatter, currency parsing and formatting, uu(en|de)coding, even fuzzy string matching! Who does this appeal to? no abstraction, no modularity, no visible type hierarchy or any sense of order.

frig 17y ago
I wasn't commenting pro-php; the php api design isn't going to win any awards other than popularity. You're not really responding to the point I was raising: poorly-designed or not, php's official site has easily-findable and easily-accessible documentation (which it needs given the quality of the api design); its official central documentation site is well within the range of modern best practices. There's not to my knowledge a comparable common lisp online reference (reference, not tutorial) that's anywhere near as accessible to the beginner or intermediate user (that nebulous phase between getting through a few tutorials and having deep knowledge). These are all excellent resources: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/ http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/ http://docs.python.org/ http://docs.python.org/ http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ http://www.php.net/manual/en/ http://www.php.net/manual/en/ http://clojure.org/Reference http://clojure.org/Reference ...etc., where is the common lisp equivalent that won't look out of place (in terms of contents + organization)? Stuff like this matters for accessibility and usability.
- mahmud 17y ago
  http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.0/ansicl/ansicl.htm http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.0/ansicl/ansicl... Please tell me which part of it is "inaccessible".
  - frig 17y ago
    Do you notice you just re-linked the hyperspec on Franz instead of Lispwork's site? I thought you'd link to this, which is better: http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.1/doc/contents.htm http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.1/doc/contents.... ...which I'd say is probably the best of the online manuals. But more to the point: There are minor issues with the formatting of the hyperspec no one's bothered fixing. Aside from the lack of a pretty stylesheet and the lack of wiki-style user comments The most obvious is that if I eg go to the Strings or Array section it just gives me a page with a sub-table of contents; it'd be a lot friendlier to have all the Array or String docs on a single html page. This wouldn't even be that hard to implement, and the "moar docs on one page" approach to online docs keeps winning out for a reason (it's easier to find what you're looking for if you only know approximately where it is if you can get everything that might be related on a single page and ctrl-f your way through it; having deeply-nested content is far unfriendlier). I do think the hyperspec is not very well-thought-through as end-user documentation. It mixes levels of concerns that ought to be separate; someone reading documentation with the goal of finding out if there's a built-in function for "split a string delimited by a particular character into a list of strings?" has very different requirements from someone who needs to know how strings are implemented, for example. IMHO the hyperspec tries to do both; it's fine as a nitty-gritty reference but could be improved as a day-to-day programmer's reference. Python's docs are a good example of end-user documentation done right. They have a clearly-delineated split between the language specification ( http://docs.python.org/reference/index.html http://docs.python.org/reference/index.html ) and the standard library specification ( http://docs.python.org/library/index.html http://docs.python.org/library/index.html ) and additional, separate documentation over lower-level aspects of implementation. Each body of documentation is organized for the convenience of its typical user.
    - 17y ago
ezy 17y ago
Aaaaaannnd... this is the number two reason Lisp's are not more successful (number one being the syntax, although that is somewhat related). Instead of helping to solve your problem, advocates (and the reference documents, "tutorials") want to engage in academic chest beating exercises. How hard is it just to acknowledge, just a teeny bit, that PHP is more successuful than Lisp for real reasons -- not just because everyone but you is an idiot. That's nice that you think the string library is appalling. Perhaps it is -- but jesus, how do you even get work done with an attitude like that? Do you write everything you do from scratch? Go write a graduate paper on the perfect string library and others can get real work done.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Instead of helping to solve your problem .. What problem are you trying to solve? Look at the manual and search Cliki to find what you need. http://www.cliki.net/index http://www.cliki.net/index I really wish programmers would stop acting so helpless and fetch for themselves.