Re: `compare-strings' style question

[David Kastrup]

tomas@tuxteam.de writes:

> Hi,
>
> In Elisp, I'm trying to test whether a string is a prefix of another.
> Poking around the documentation, I stumbled upon `compare-strings',
> which seems to do the job fairly well. The interface is a bit weird
> (at least as seen from Lisp) It feels more like C's strcmp.
>
> It returns t on exact match, and some numbers on mismatch. I understand
> that the result might be useful in some cases (it tells one by how many
> chars we miss a match), but then I can't just do
>
>   (when (compare-strings foo 0 5 bar 0 5)
>     ...)
>
> but must do
>
>
>   (when (eq (compare-strings foo 0 5 bar 0 5) t)
>     ...)
>
> which looks rather funny. My question: are there better idioms? Am I
> barking up the wrong function?

(unless (numberp ...

or

(if (symbolp ...

-- 
David Kastrup