Re: Manifesto against Vector

[Matthew Heaney <matthewjheaney@earthlink.net>]

Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com> writes:

> What Unbounded_String does give us is guidance and reasons about how
> to design and name an unbound array abstraction and its
> operations. Since Unbounded_String is a special case of an unbounded
> array, for consistency an unbounded array package added now should
> have similar operations to Unbounded_Strings, with the same name when
> possible, and be named something like Unbounded_Array. Calling it
> Vector, having a bunch of operations that aren't in Unbounded_String,
> and different names for the operations that exist in both is a good
> way to create confusion.

Indeed, it's a good thing the vector isn't named "Unbounded_Array",
since it's not an unbounded array.  (The vector uses an unbounded array
as a model, in order to describe the semantics of the abstraction, but
of course that doesn't mean the vector is an unbounded array.  In fact,
at least two compiler vendors will not be using an unbounded array as
the representation of their vector implementation.)