Should we replace send/receive with some other verbs?

Splitting this discussion off from #796, and specifically the subthread starting here

@njsmith:

On another note: as I write receive_exactly and receive_until and receive receive receive, I'm somewhat regretting the decision to name our primitives send/receive. I do like the emphasis that these are active transfers "in the moment", versus read/write that refer to modifying passive media – and also it's good to avoid associations with Python's conventions around read, which are really inappropriate for Streams and for Channels, for different reasons. But receive is just an awkward word: kinda long, annoying to spell. I'd be tempted by get/put, except then we'd have Stream.get_some and that seems like a bad idea. give/take? put/take? put_all/get_any? Or just stick with send/receive... Maybe this should be a separate issue.

@smurfix:

WRT put/get: Umm … thinking about it, put/get works for single messages, while send/receive makes more sense for byte/character streams. This is because I associate put/get with things like channels or queues that you can use to put some single thing in on one end and get it out the other end.
send/receive on the other hand is for bytestreams and similar where the focus of these methods is on partitioning the stream into semantic chunks.

Calling receive_exactly on four bytes (and then N bytes) to de-partition a byte-encoded message > stream makes sense.
Calling get_exactly to read N HTTP requests or MQTT messages? not so much.

Yes, receive is awkward. So … use recv instead?

@njsmith:

thinking about it, put/get works for single messages, while send/receive makes more sense for byte/character streams. This is because I associate put/get with things like channels or queues that you can use to put some single thing in on one end and get it out the other end.

That's why I find them attractive :-). For single objects we currently have Channel.send and Channel.receive, and for byte streams we have Stream.send_all and Stream.receive_some. So in all cases, the verb on its own is being used to refer to single objects, and then sometimes we have a modifier to make it plural.

And get_exactly would take a Stream specifically, not a Channel, so I don't think there'd be any confusion about using it for MQTT.

Review issue #796 and the subthread linked in this issue, then compare the existing Channel.send/receive and Stream.send_all/receive_some naming. The work is complete when the project has a decided, consistent replacement or rationale for retaining the current verbs across these APIs.