On Jan 22, 5:54 pm, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@nospam.invalid> wrote: > Giovanni Bajo <ra...@develer.com> writes: > > * I'm not a native speaker, but why use the word "Counter"? > > I agree with this, the new functionality is welcome but I think > the traditional term "multiset" or "bag" would have been better.
The term counter was what was originally approved. At first, I didn't like it but found that it had some advantages. The main advantage is that there are *bazillions* of programmers (including some very good ones) who have never heard the term multiset or bag but have an instant, intuitive understanding of counting and counters. Also, in the context of this implementation, "multiset" would not be a good choice. The mathematical entity, multiset, is defined with elements having a count of one or more. In contrast, the Counter class allows counts to go to zero or become negative. In addition, I worried that calling it a multiset would suggest that it has a set-like API instead of a dict-like API. With the former, you write c.add(elem). With the latter, you write c[elem] += 1. So the name, "multiset" would be misleading. Bike-shed discussions aside (everyone has an opinion of how to name things), how do you guys like the functionality? Do you find it useable in real-world use cases? Raymond -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
