why javascript splice called splice even though it doesn't join but splits the array

Question

JavaScript splice method actually splits an array into two as shown in the below example:

var a = ['a','b','c'];
var b = a.splice(0,2);
console.log(a); // outputs ['c']
console.log(b); // outputs ['a'.'b']

Then why is it called splice since splice means to join

Answer 1

I'd imagine its named after RNA/DNA splicing where both addition and removal are called splicing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_splicing

The splice method in JavaScript can both add and remove, so yeah.

Answer 2

Actually JavaScript: the first 20 years said this

1.2 [Netscape 1997c]. Most of the library additions were inspired by features available in other popular languages. The Array concat and slice methods were inspired by Python’s sequence op- erations. The Array push, pop, shift, unshift, and splice were directly modeled on like-named Perl array functions.

So it came from perl