favorite favourite

What's your favourite standard library function?

Mine is Matlab's squeeze. Every time I use it I can imagine my hyperdimensional manifestation pushing the matrix until all those useless dimensions become shiny drops of acid that are slowly absorbed into the surrounding space.

>>24
Guess this'll give you an ulcer, but that sort of thing is common in Haskell-land. It's even in the standard prelude, no modules need be imported or anything. "foldl" is the name.

My favourite would be C's ungetc(). I mean, when's the last time you wanted to _un_-get precisely _ONE_ character? It's like a throwback to ancient times, when people wrote parsers that read data character by character using the C standard library, and failure recovery would be via un-getting characters already read...