Dan Brian writes: > If there's a willingness to rename shift/unshift, why not consider > going a bit further (and offend shell heritage) to note that pull/put > aren't really linguistically opposed either (unlike push/pull). Why not > rename pop to pull, and use something like put/take for shift/unshift? > Having push and pull operate on opposite ends of an array strikes me as > more confusing than even shift. When it comes to adding and removing > elements, shouldn't there be semantic opposition for functions that > operate on the same end?
I don't think that's a good time. It kills the array-as-stack idiom, which, well, everybody uses all the time. I don't mind the linguistic nonopposition of pull/put. The main thing I don't like is the alliteration between push/pop. That makes for very difficult mnemonics. Obviously, the CS-literate can just remember that they're the nonstack ops, but many Perlers are Shellers and Adminers, without being CSers. I've actually been happy with shift/unshift. But what we'd really like to do is: given the user knows what push/pop do, what would they *guess* to mean shift (I tend to think that this is a very good technique for naming). And, well, I'm thinking pull. So it's a toss-up between shift/unshift and put/pull. Luke
