Historically we have tended to use the word "item" to refer to the input comparable objects fed to a generic quantiles sketch and to use the word "value" to refer to the numeric primitives fed to the sketches that are dedicated to the numeric primitives, double, float and long. However, we have been very inconsistent in this usage.
As I am going through all the code for the REQ (floats), KLL (doubles & floats), and the classic quantiles sketch, I am trying to make the above convention more consistent at least for the internal code. However, there is one area where I feel we should probably leave things the way they are and that is with the public APIs. For example, the methods getMinValue(), getMaxValue(), should probably stay the same for both generic and numeric sketches. Otherwise, trying to create a uniform API (at least for the main queries) across these sketches will be messy. The other option would be to use "value" everywhere, even internally, for the generic sketches. I don't have a strong preference, but would like some comments on this.
