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Postings from December 2003
On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 06:58:46PM +0530, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: > At 2003-12-01 17:50:32 -0600, whatever@davidnicol.com wrote: > > > > This operation was termed "translation" by some whimsical software > > engineer deep in the mists of long-ago, due to the functional > > similarity between the operation of tr(1) and the activity of > > translating language by looking up words in a bilinugal dictionary. > > Er, did you mean to say transliterate instead of translate? If so, then > the rest of your message makes no sense, because there is no similarity > between the operation of tr(1) and looking up words in a dictionary. If > not, then your message still makes no sense, because the operation was > never termed translation in the first place. The operation *was* termed translation in the first place. In fact, tr(1) is still termed translation: "tr -- translate characters". Some time ago the perl docs were changed to describe tr/// as the transliteration operator instead of the translation operator . This was not a consensus decision, by the way. Personally, I think "translate" is the better choice. In particular, true transliteration would sometimes require a single character to be replaced with a sequence of characters, which is not possible with tr///. translation more accurately describes the one-to-one relationship possible with tr///. RonaldThread Previous | Thread Next