On 11/23/11 at 16:38, dher...@mozilla.com (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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