Good call. Not necessarily want to use showpos.. its main advantage right now is that it nicely returns nil when I try to read any out-of-bound position.
I guess without showpos I could grab the appropriate rows from world and discard the first X and last Y positions.
From here on I adapted the function to the one I really needed (do something if one of the 8 neighbours of posx, posy is X). Because of that requirement it seemed easier to just gather the row - 1 and row + 1 and the row, col - 1 and row, col + 1, and join those in a list. This is what it ended up as:
(if (find X (flat:map [join (errsafe (world _))] (list (- row 1) (+ row 1) (- col 1) (+ col 1))))
; do stuff
)
