TIP #272: String and List Reversal Operations
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TIP:	272
Title:	String and List Reversal Operations
Version:	$Revision: 1.4 $
Authors:	Donal K. Fellows <donal.k.fellows@manchester.ac.uk>
State:	Final
Type:	Project
Tcl-Version:	8.5
Vote:	Done
Created:	Wed Aug 23 00:00:00 UTC 2006
Keywords:	Tcl, lreverse
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.
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