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Fwd: Renaming grep

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David Storrs

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Nov 17, 2005, 10:44:54 PM11/17/05
to Perl6 Language List
Drat, thought I was sending this to the list:


Begin forwarded message:

> On Nov 17, 2005, at 8:31 PM, Ilmari Vacklin wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I think that grep should be renamed to something English and more,
>> well,
>> semantic. 'Filter' comes to mind as a suggestion. I realise there's a
>> lot of cultural background (from Unix and Perl 5) that favours
>> 'grep',
>> but I think it's more important to name the language elements
>> consistently (the right kind of consistency, I hope).
>
> 'sift' is the same number of characters as 'grep'. It's something
> of a bikeshed to me whether this rename is implemented or not, though.
>
> --Dks
>

Ilmari Vacklin

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Nov 18, 2005, 10:46:51 PM11/18/05
to perl6-l...@perl.org
On to, 2005-11-17 at 22:44 -0500, David Storrs wrote:
> 'sift' is the same number of characters as 'grep'. It's something
> of a bikeshed to me whether this rename is implemented or not, though.

I don't much like it - it looks like a mistyped 'shift'. Is 'filter' too
long?

--
wolverian <ilmari....@helsinki.fi>

Chip Salzenberg

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Nov 18, 2005, 11:08:39 PM11/18/05
to Ilmari Vacklin, perl6-l...@perl.org
On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 05:46:51AM +0200, Ilmari Vacklin wrote:
> I don't much like it - it looks like a mistyped 'shift'.
> Is 'filter' too long?

I usually avoid P6L discussions, but:

GNU Make has "filter" and "filter-out", and I've always found the
polarity hard to remember.

I like grep.
--
Chip Salzenberg <ch...@pobox.com>

Dan Kogai

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Nov 19, 2005, 4:32:13 AM11/19/05
to perl6-l...@perl.org
On Nov 19, 2005, at 13:08 , Chip Salzenberg wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 05:46:51AM +0200, Ilmari Vacklin wrote:
>
>> I don't much like it - it looks like a mistyped 'shift'.
>> Is 'filter' too long?
>>
>
> I usually avoid P6L discussions, but:
>
> GNU Make has "filter" and "filter-out", and I've always found the
> polarity hard to remember.
>
> I like grep.
>

I like grep, too.

FYI google gave me 6,650,000 "grep"s and 4,390,000 "sift"s.
IMHO grep is popular enough.
Well, google gave me some 158,000,000 "filter"s but that's rather too
common and ambiguous. Note filter does not always sift (i.e. perl -
ple '$_="$.:$_"').

Dan the (grepp|sift|filter)ed Man

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