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Re: count

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Bruce Hoult wrote:
> Is there any particular reason that Dylan doesn't have a "count()" 
> function built-in?
> [snip useful function]

I think the only reason is that there are so many equally often useful
functions that, if we put them all in standard libraries, we'd end up with
really huge standard libraries :-)  Hence the Dylan library has a smallish
assortment of often-useful functions, but no particular sense of
completeness.  (Hmm ... I wonder if there could be some mathematical or
logical definition of such completeness, or degrees thereof, and hence
some way to pick a "reasonably sized" set of functions ... ?)

Having one or more "extension" libraries for this sort of thing is a good
idea IMHO, or even just libraries of functions for you to cut'n'paste into
your own code, without worrying about all this new-fangled shared-library
stuff :-)

Hugh
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