Smylers wrote:
Damian Conway writes:
> I don't object in principle to renaming "grep" to something more self
> explanatory (except for the further loss of backwards compatability
> and historical Unix reference...though that didn't stop us with
> "switch" vs "given" ;-)
But while C<switch> had precedence in computer science in general it
didn't have this in Perl; your Switch module is not used much in Perl 5,
and Perl 6's C<given> is a substantial improvement over the C<switch>
statement in most languages.
Whereas C<grep> is a well-known and well-used Perl 5 function, and this
functionality is not being changed in Perl 6 (other than being available
as a method as well as a function).
IMHO, syntax should be left alone until a compelling reason to change
it is found. While I think it would be nice to have a more intuitive
name for grep, I don't think that this qualifies as a compelling
reason to change it - especially since it's so easy to add aliases via
modules, such as the aforementioned "use English". My recommendation:
leave it as grep, but leave a note for whomever is going to create the
perl6 analog of the English module that they might want to provide a
more intuitive name for it.
--
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
