I can well understand them getting rid of chop, although I do think the main problem is having it named so similarly to chomp.

When I was beginning Perl I came across chop and chomp, and whilst I could remember the fact that one wasn't fussy what it removed and one only removed end-of-line characters it took me a remarkable amount of time to learn which was which. Caused some nasty bugs, too.

Since I learnt the names properly I don't think I've ever touched chop for anything. So far you've only said you've been able to find one example, and people can do it with substr's (substr ($foo,-1) = '', admittedly messy), or a simple regexp $foo =~ s/.$//; which to me is perfectly readable. I really don't see the advantage of keeping chop paying off against the risk of having the confusing (and easily mis-typed) chomp/chop pair.

I also can't see many people are going to go and write their own version of chop, to be honest. It's a simple enough thing to 'just do' and the function call imposes a much higher overhead than the operation itself.

In reply to Re: a farewell to chop by Molt
in thread a farewell to chop by John M. Dlugosz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.