The Common Lisp Utilities cliki page served as a collection of useful CL utilities. The idea to create a bigger package out of the small suggested packages here got momentum, and resulted in the creation of cl-utilities.
Motivated by the benefits of discussing design issues in public, possibly utilities "that everyone writes" could be canonicalized and (semi-)standardized.
- SPLIT-SEQUENCE
- EXTREMUM
- READ-DELIMITED (name is up to debate) - reads a 'line' delimited by the specified character, optionally into a pre-allocated buffer
- EXPT-MOD (name is up to debate) - calculates (mod (expt a b) m)
- COLLECTING for collecting things into one or more lists
- WITH-UNIQUE-NAMES executes a series of forms with variables bound to fresh, uninterned symbols
- GENSYMLET binds fresh, uninterned symbols to values
- ROTATE-BYTE bit-rotates a byte
- ARGUMENT-LIST (name, purpose, raison d'etre up for debate) returns the arglist of a function - useful for editor interfaces, documentation generators etc. Code could be stolen from ILISP/SLIME/clocc-port for implementations that don't have their own.
- SHALLOW-COPY-ARRAY
- COMPOSE composes functions.
- Also worth looking at PARSE-NUMBER
- DECIMAL-NUMBER