[erlang-questions] erlang-questions Digest, Vol 17, Issue 45

[Richard O'Keefe]

I note that "explode" has historically meant
"to break a string (or equivalent) into a list of its
  single-character elements",
which is not all that split/unjoin does.

Some of the names in the 'lists' module were copied
from Haskell.  It's a pity that Haskell's "splitAt"
was copied as "split".

I dare say Ruby and PHP (?) got the name 'split'
from Perl, which got it from 'AWK', where a
*regular expression* controls the splitting.

This is the other reason for preferring to call the
operation 'unjoin': anyone familiar with "split" in
AWK, Perl, &c will expect string:split/2 to take a
regular expression parameter, and this one DOESN'T.

There is, or should be, a regular pattern
	words <-> unwords
	lines <-> unlines
	unjoin <-> join
Oh well, sort of regular...

When I clicked on the Documentation link on the scutil page,
I got to some sort of Wiki thingie, with no documentation
that I could see.