Re: The translate operator (was Re: [MacPerl] regex help)

[Don Arbow <donarb@nwlink.com>]

On 11/28/99 at 12:21 PM, Chris Nandor wrote:

: At 11.45 -0500 1999.11.28, Ronald J Kimball wrote:
: >In fact, I would say it the other way around: tr/// does not mean
: >"transliterate", but some people think it does.
: 
: Well, you can say that, but I won't.  Anyway, this is kinda off topic, so
: quickly: I think you are slightly misrepresenting the argument.
: 
: Basically, transliterate is defined in my dictionaries as to REPRESENT (not
: necessarily "spell", which blurs the issue) a word in another alphabet
: (which to my mind includes "character sets").  Clearly tr/// involves
: representing letters in another character set.  And even if you disagree
: with the slight loosening of the definition of "alphabet", it is still very
: close.
: 
: And even if you still disagree, there is always Rule #1 ("Larry is always
: right").  Larry likes "transliterate" better, and the docs have been
: changed accordingly, with his blessing.
: 


Well, my Camel book (1st Edition, third printing) calls it translate.  Effective
Perl Programming calls it transliterate. I was used to translate since I learned
IBM 370 assembler, the instruction set contains a translate-and-test instruction,
using a 256 byte buffer.

How about we make up a word, like transalphacate?

Don



# ===== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
# ===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org