First Post

OK. It is going to take me awhile to figure out how to do what I want to do with blogspot. Argh. I want real html table formatting people.

I'm starting to look at common lisp and I do a lot of text data manipulation. So one of the first things I looked at was string concatenation. Hmm. Lots of ways of doing it, some of them faster than others.

After reading these entries: http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2007/12/26/string-building-comparison-with-lisp and Concatenate is slow on string concatenation, I decided to
do some timing on my own. If I am interpreting the numbers
correctly, the arnesi:join-strings function is almost always faster
on short strings. HOWEVER, if you replace the short strings with
long strings, it actually becomes the slowest if *PRINT_PRETTY* is
nil. If *PRINT-PRETTY* is T, it is still faster than format and concatenate. I will put up tables as soon as I can figure out how I can format them to my liking here.
the short string results: