bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
I'm rather weary of a short and suggestive name that embodies a linear
operation. I recall there was a discussion about that a while ago in
this newsgroup. I'd rather call it linearLength or something that
suggests it's a best-effort function that may take O(n).
I remember parts of that discussion, and I like your general rule, and I agree
that generally it's better to give the programmer a hint of the complexity of a
specific operation, for example a method of a user defined class, etc.
But len() is supposed to be used very often, so it's better to keep it short,
because if you don't have an IDE it's not nice to type linearLength() one time
every 2 lines of code.
Being used so often also implies that you remember how it works, so you are
supposed to be able to remember it can be O(n) on lazy iterators.
So in this specific case I think it's acceptable to break your general rule,
for practical reasons.
Bye,
bearophile
If it's used often it shouldn't have linear complexity :o).
Andrei
