Is “catenate” used in IT parlance?

Question

When I was doing my IT degree in the 80s we learned that, in programming terms, concatenation was the act of joining two strings together.

Recently I was reading a technical manual and came across the word catenate in the same context.

A quick look at dictionary.com seems to indicate that catenate is used in a biological context. Another post on this site discusses concatenate and decatenate — the use of con- and de- as prefixes on catenate to indicate the construction or destruction of string sequences.

I'm curious as to whether IT professionals are now using the simpler word catenate when talking about concatenation?

Answer 1

No, IT professionals are (mostly) still using the word concatenate. I've never heard anyone use catenate.

There's a command called cat, but it's short for the longer word rather than catenate. According to its own help:

Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output.

On Stack Overflow there's 4,150 results for concatenate (98.3%) but only 70 for catenate (1.7%), and 5,000+ results for concatenated (~99.8%) but only 11 for catenated (~0.2%).

Likewise, searching code on GitHub gives 619,288 results for concatenate (97.8%) and 14,225 for catenate (2.2%).

Finally, despite the suggestion elsewhere that discatenate would be the opposite of concatenate, discatenate is not in common IT use: 1 result on Stack Overflow and 0 code results at GitHub. This is a problem with single word requests: someone has asked what the opposite would be, and in the accepted answer someone has come up with a new word by looking at the roots. The answer with the most votes is the much clearer split, which has 3,110 Stack Overflow results and 8,001,847 on GitHub's code search.