Hi Factor people,

As some of you already know, I'm working on a protocol for associative
arrays (assocs) like hashtables, alists and various trees. The code is
mostly done, except for some persistent bugs. Hopefully, it'll be
included in .89. Details are on my blog (useless-factor.blogspot.com),
if anyone's interested. Anyway, I'm not sure what to name everything.
Currently, the naming convention is to take the current hash names and
replace hash with assoc, removing superfluous prefixes where they
exist. But I think that's sorta ugly, and I have another idea, which
Slava doesn't particularly like.

I think it might be better to rename the generic hash and set-hash to
at and set-at. remove-hash could be called remove-at and change-hash
could become change-at, but most of the other combinators would keep
the same names. Slava told me that this name doesn't "scale" but I
don't think that's really necessary. nth doesn't scale, either, but
it's still a useful nemonic.

My other idea is to replace assoc with dict. Though it overlaps with
some existing Factor usage (the dictionary is where words are stored),
I think it would be clearer to call associative arrays dictionaries.
For one, whenever assoc is used in some other language, it refers to
alist lookup. Another reason is that dictionary is shorter and easier
to say than associative array. In discussing the Factor dictionary
which stores words and definitions, we could maintain a distinction
between "a dictionary" and "the dictionary".

So I wanted input from all of you guys as to what you think about
these names. What do you think?

Daniel Ehrenberg

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