>
> > What possible genericity is there about downcase/upcase? Okay they work
> on strings and on chars,
> > but it's pretty clear their topic is "characters" (string) no?
>
> Always and forever? Are strings, one-dimensional sequences of
> characters by definition, the only thing you can think about that
> involves characters whose case can be mutated?
>

Oh, it's designed for possible future structure in mind? While an
interesting point I think it's a bit far fetched.



> > > Do you think this organization would be useful? What if it had a cool
> > > font and some cool logos? :-)  I ask because that put me off at first,
> it
> > > looked mouldy.)
> >
> > Yes, that'd be very useful and it's more or less what we are asking
> > to be able to do. Again curious, do you think they made a mistake
> > when they named it `string-downcase` there and not `downcase`?
>
> It only works on strings in CL, but characters are defined to be "singleton
> string designators", a common concept in CL. Maybe they couldn't
> quite decide on a generic version. You see CL didn't  come from
> nothing, it was a giant and very expensive effort to reconcile a
> _lot_ of competing Lisps.
>

Interesting.


> > >> s-truncate (len s)
> > > truncate-string-to-width (I got there with apropos truncate.*string
> btw).
> >
> > Okay then let's alias that to string-truncate.
>
> To achieve what? I would only bring confusion.  Also to the s.el
> cool kids, they would be equally confused, since the arguments
> are reversed.
>

Can you stop with the "cool kids" labelling? I mean we are all old farts
here :-P I just happen to have learnt both ways (readings lots of C++ books
then eating lots of Ruby tutorials) and both are useful depending on what
you do.



> > >> s-left (len s)
> > >subseq
> > >> s-right (len s)
> > > Add an "from-end" arg to subseq?
> >
> > Why is there substring if there is subseq then?
>
> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ History?  substring has both optional args.
> Use substring if you absolutely know your sequence
> is a string, subseq otherwise.
>

Thanks for the clarification.



> > >> s-repeat (num s)
> > > (cl-loop repeat num concat s)
> >
> > What if I don't know cl (like I a significant number of package authors)
> ?
>
> I think you might want to learn how to loop if you're going to program.
> You can use while, do, etc. cl-loop is just my favourite.
> I don't think this function needs to be in a library, but maybe an example
> of how do this can be in one of those boring paragraphs of the manual.
>

The implication that I don't know how to do loops is a bit mean, but I'll
let that pass. I don't know `cl` (tho I copy-pasted some in the past), but
I do know loops. I was always somewhat taught that `cl` was not _really_
emacs lisp so you should not use it. Maybe that's wrong.



> > >> s-contains-p (needle s &optional ignore-case)
> > > string-match-p
> > That can work, tho the mental path of having to do a regexp match
> > while regexp-quoting the string just to do a plain text search feels
> very inneficient.
>
> Well, I honestly had to look up the doc if "needle" was a string
> or a character.  So that mental path is quite worse for me.
>

Again very interesting: needle and haystack is also a metaphor used in many
languages. It's another point where I'd have thought you were trolling if
you didn't understand!



> > >> s-blank-p (s)
> > > ugh. nil is a string?
> > "is the string blank?" is a concept in many languages,
> > but I understand it can be surprising at first.
>
> Yes, things are suprising at first, then you learn them.
> Get the hint? ;-)


:-)

Maybe a bit of information that can be useful for you is that I code
packages since a while now, for example https://github.com/Silex/docker.el

It's been years since I use Emacs. I obviously never took the proper time
to learn it in full depth but I'm not a "newbie".

Philippe