Mostly, I agree with your point of view..chop isn't always needed, but killing off a function after years of use (especially one that presumably takes up so little space in the scheme of things) and is still somewhat relevant with no exact replacement, makes little sense to me. However, as per this statement: "...but I would have to look up the arguments in the docs, to tell it to locate from index -1 through the end, and replace with nothing", I believe that this can be accomplished a little simpler (at least to me) as thus:

$str='abcde';
$str = substr $str,0,(length($str)-1);
print $str;
[download]

Which effectively truncates the last character, as chop() does. To me, that makes almost as much sense as chop does though, so beyond golf or obfuscation, I personally won't miss it much (I don't have that many legacy scripts that need to hack off one char).A chop() method in the string class with variable length would be nice as well :)
-Marc

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