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From: dick@tjalk.UUCP (Dick Grune)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: The Naming of Arrays
Message-ID: <587@tjalk.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 2-Jun-86 12:11:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: tjalk.587
Posted: Mon Jun  2 12:11:24 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Jun-86 07:51:29 EDT
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 54
Summary: Are the names of arrays singular, plural, or other?


This may not be the most important thing in the world, but I like
the names of entities in my program to be so clear that I can still
tell what I meant by them a year from now. (Sounds good, doesn't it?)

Now arrays always give me some problems.  Say I need an array of
words; first I intuitively declare them as (examples are from
C, but you get the same in Pascal, Ada or WhatNot :-)

struct word words[N_WORDS];

but then I need the n-th element, I write   words[n]   and I think
it sounds funny, since I do not want  "words n"  but  "word n", not
the n-th words, but the n-th word.  So I change the declaration to

struct word word[N_WORDS];

which now looks funny, but then there is only one of them, and I can
now freely write   word[4]  .  (I agree that this account rambles,
but I do not write this to get an A in journalism.)

After a while, however, I begin to regret that I have used up my
precious singular form of the word for a relatively little used
item, the array.  I can no longer write locally

	for (i = 0; i < N_WORDS; i++)	{
		struct word word = word[i];
		...
	}
and I resort to constructions like
		struct word wordi = word[i];
or
		struct word wrd = word[i];

Lately I've been using

struct word word_array[N_WORDS];   and
		struct word word = word_array[i];

but I'm not really enthousiastic either.

To my feeling this gets worse if the plural is irregular: children[4]
looks a lot more odd to me than child[4].  I think it is even worse in
languages where the formation of plurals is more prominent than in
English;  the German form   "Woerter[4]"  is absurd compared to
"Wort[4]"  (I think).

Has anybody out there given this some explicit thought?  How do YOU
name your arrays?
					Dick Grune
					Vrije Universiteit
					de Boelelaan 1081
					1081 HV  Amsterdam
					the Netherlands