On 11/23/11 at 16:38, [email protected] (David Herman) wrote:
I'm just basing this on my experience. I'm used to "the number
of things in this collection" being called the "size" not the "length".
I'm OK with any of: length, size, count, or even
numberOfThingsCollected. (I realize Brendan will object to the
camel caps, and everyone will object to the verbosity of that
last not-terribly-serious suggestion.)
I just want one standard name that applies to arrays and all
other collections. (I realize it's hard to force future
collection authors to follow our standard, but we can strongly encourage.)
Also, as someone pointed out in this thread, the length of an
array is *not* the same as the number of indexed elements of
the array, thanks to holes. So not only are the words different
in English (IME, IMHO, YMMV, yadda yadda yadda) but the actual
operations we're talking about are different.
So "length" does have something to do with the amount of machine
storage used, although its in funny units and ignores fixed
overhead and possible implementation optimizations. :-)
If we pick a word other than length, we could make it ignore
holes in arrays so "foo" isn't necessarily equal to "length".
Cheers - Bill
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