State: Final
Type: Project
Tcl-Version: 8.5
Vote: Done
Post-History:
Author: Donal K. Fellows <[email protected]>
Created: 23-Aug-2006
Keywords: Tcl, lreverse
Tcl-Ticket: 1545151
Abstract
This TIP proposes adding commands to reverse the order of characters in strings and elements in lists.
Rationale
According to a recent thread on news:comp.lang.tcl http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/a0b8c98c00a31ffc , there are a number of use cases for reversing strings and lists. While it has always been possible to write Tcl code to do this, it has typically been a fairly inefficient operation, and for some algorithms (admittedly including ones that are benchmarked when comparing Tcl to other languages) this can be the source of a painful slowdown. By putting an efficient implementation in the Tcl core, we will speed up quite a bit of code, more than I originally anticipated it seems; this will make us look better to programmers without much experience with the language too.
Proposed Change
I propose to add two commands, lreverse to reverse the order of items in a list, and string reverse (a subcommand of string) to reverse the order of characters in a string. I do not propose to provide any C-level API for performing these operations.
The lreverse Command
This shall have the following syntax:
lreverse list
It shall return a list that is the same as the input list but with the elements in reverse order.
The reverse Subcommand of the string Command
This shall have the following syntax:
string reverse string
It shall return a string that is the same as the input string but with the characters in reverse order. (Note that it shall also return a byte array when the input is a byte array.)
Copyright
This document has been placed in the public domain.