concatenating strings

[David A. Moon <Moon at SCRC-TENEX at MIT-MC>]

    Date: 27 FEB 83 19:34 PST
    From: MASINTER.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
    A simple
    way of taking a list of strings and turning it into
    a single string of the list concatenated.

I don't know why KMP suggested you call STRING-APPEND, a function that
was removed from the language because some people out there didn't like
it.  Anyway, the correct answer to that query seems to be
	(APPLY #'CONCATENATE 'STRING L)
which doesn't seem too un-simple.  You can also do it with REDUCE, but
not quite as nicely.

The other two queries don't have good answers.  I certainly agree that
this language is not the ultimate and will need a lot more work.  I think
it's a worthwhile start, though.

    Primitives for
    dealing with time-intervals, e.g., give me a designator
    for a time three hours from now.
(+ (get-universal-time) (* 3 60. 60.)).  But of course that doesn't work
for things of variable length, like months and years.  The Common Lisp
time functions are distinctly oversimplified.  Perhaps a more realistic
set can be provided as a portable package?

    Simple ways of dealing with file access paths, file versions.
This is pretty vague...I don't think much of the Common Lisp pathname
stuff, but I'm not sure what you want.  A lot of its problem is that
it's too simple.