On 2006-May-10 at 1:38, James Mastros wrote: >Can I suggest we keep match meaning thing you get when you run a thingy >against a string, and make "matcher" be the thingy that gets run?
Speaking of the word "match", what I'd really like is to keep it meaning stuff that matches. Unfortunately it also seems to get used to mean an "attempted match", which, if it fails, is not a match at all. This leads to the phrase "successful match", which sounds a bit bizarre and is redundant in ordinary English. S05 uses "match" in both senses, and more than once I had to, er, backtrack to figure out which meaning was intended. Obviously, good words are needed for both meanings: "match" should always stand for a "successful match" ('cause that's what the word actually means), and some other term for the act of comparing two things to see whether or not they do happen to match. (The word "compare" comes to mind.) -David "grudge match" Green