State:		Final
Type:		Project
Tcl-Version:	8.5
Vote:		Done
Post-History:	
Author:		Donal K. Fellows <donal.k.fellows@manchester.ac.uk>
Created:	23-Aug-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