PARSE-DELIMITED-LIST
design
(SPLIT-SEQUENCE
on steroids)
I wrote a text-mode Sokoban in Common-Lisp quite some time ago, and now beefed it up a little with a CLIM GUI. Sokoban is easy enough that it does not get in the way when trying out technologies, and still one can make good use of a number of language features. Besides, Sokoban is interesting from other points of view. :)
Getting up to speed in CLIM is very easy, and I was pleasantly surprised how fast I could see results. It basically took two weekend afternoons, without prior CLIM knowledge. Not too shabby for learning a completely new toolkit.
CLIM sports a wealth of readily available functionality, like caching unchanged screen areas, redrawing them only on demand (activated by adding a couple of options).
The Annotated CLIM Specification turned out to be most helpful, as well as the #lisp crowd at Freenode (as usual).
"...Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list." -- Kent M. Pitman