Jonathan Lang wrote:
Larry Wall wrote:
Mark J. Reed wrote:
: I have no horse in this race. My personal preference would be to
: leave grep as "grep". My second choice is "select", which to me is
: more descriptive than "filter"; it also readily suggests an antonym of
: "reject" to do a "grep -v" (cf. "if !" vs "unless"). But I'd accept
: "filter", too.
Given a choice between 'grep', 'filter', and 'select/reject', I'd
prefer the third model: it counterbalances the break from tradition
with additional functionality.
The first thing that I saw in one of Larry's messages about p6 that made
me excited about it was the fact that breaking with backward
compatibility would mean that we could be rid of the select function
that wasn't actually POSIX select. Now, I realize that select in P6 is
almost certain to be a method-only, but still... for anyone who has done
more than a little POSIX programming, the use of select as a list
operator will be jarring as all get-out.
This is one of those situations where I find myself asking: what are we
trying to solve? Is it the fact that grep is not an English word? Does
Perl have to be in English?
If grep must die, then I'd suggest filter/reject.
