meow!

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!MBM at MIT-XX]

From: Michael B McIlrath <MBM at MIT-XX>
A point not brought up in all this ado over "cat" and "grep"
is that there isnt a single snappy familiar English word
that that succintly describes either of those programs.

I think what the people who want to call "cat" "ty" (for
type I gather) really want is another program that does
exactly "cat $1 > /dev/tty" or some such.  This was one
of the complaints of the Datamation article; cat does too
many weird things.  (As an aside , altho cat seems to be
the canonical unix program as well as canonical 
whipping boy for malcontents, I use it rarely; I look
at files with "p"  which both couldnt be shorter and reminds
me of "print".)  I dont know of another program
that does what grep does on another system; I recently ported
it to a tops-20.  However, if it were renamed "search" people
would probably be just as likely to confuse it with "find" as
to find it an easier mnemonic.   It would help if somebody 
bothered to explain what "grep" stands for, but I found it
a fine mnemonic before I knew.   Which is what I am getting at:
if you are going to have a new and strange object in your world,
not quite like anything you already know, it might just as well
have a new and strange name, and once you have used it a few times,
the funny name will refer exactly to the funny object.  Why
"unix" and "C"?  You prefer "OS" and "APL"?  Is one more meaningful
than the other?
--mike
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