Nov 16 meeting notes

[Bill Frantz]

On 11/23/11 at 16:38, dherman at 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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