On Tuesday, 14 July 2015 at 14:06:04 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
STL's "sequential containers" do not have serial dependence on
items. There, "sequential" is meant as a converse of
"associative".
Indeed, but the term "sequence" has existed long before the STL
authors (mis)used it. Actually, 3 of the 5 main "sequence
containers" *are* sequences. The other 2, vector (which is
another name that has always bothered me) and array, are really
best described as a random-access containers, but the authors
probably didn't want to split hairs and make another category.
My interpretation of the word "list" both in and out of the CS
domain jives with random access. Consider a stream. I define it
to be truly a "sequence" of bytes, specifically because of its
serial nature. I would definitely *not* define it as a "list" of
bytes.
When we say "these items must be accessed in sequence", we imply
that Item(n+1) should be accessed only after Item(n) is accessed.
In our nomenclature, we should probably look more to the origin
of terms, and their usage in other domains, than their (mis)use
in the CS domain, especially C++.
Mike
