On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 22:52:09 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
> AliasSeq?? What is that even supposed to mean? Are we just throwing random words together?

A sequence of aliases, personally I think it is a much better name. But maybe seq could be replaced with something else, though I don't really mind seq. AliasList seems a little bit better.

On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 23:30:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> In fact thinking of it AliasArray seems most descriptive. -- Andrei

I like this as well, but calling it an array might make people think you can assign to its elements.

On 7/7/15 7:32 PM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 23:30:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> In fact thinking of it AliasArray seems most descriptive. -- Andrei
>
> I like this as well, but calling it an array might make people think you
> can assign to its elements.

Well it depends on the element type, e.g. you can't assign to slots of an array of immutable elements because you can't assign the individual types to start with. By extension you can't assign to elements of an array of aliases because you can't assign an alias to another to start wityh. -- Andrei

On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 23:30:25 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 22:52:09 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
>> AliasSeq?? What is that even supposed to mean? Are we just throwing random words together?
>
> A sequence of aliases, personally I think it is a much better name. But maybe seq could be replaced with something else, though I don't really mind seq. AliasList seems a little bit better.

it's far closer to a tuple, list, or array than a sequence.

On 07/08/2015 01:30 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>
> In fact thinking of it AliasArray seems most descriptive. -- Andrei

Not really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_data_structure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_data_type

Neither is is fitting.

On 08-Jul-2015 02:29, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 7/7/15 5:24 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 07/07/2015 11:16 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Template arguments are indexable, so "sequence" doesn't quite apply.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence#Indexing
>
> Hmm, fair enough. Sequential as opposed to associative.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_container_(C%2B%2B) also comes to
> mind.
>
> Then, at least let's use the whole darn word. Doesn't seem like the
> short form is helping a lot here.
>

I believe Seq is quite fitting as the venerable TypeTuple  was used frequently enough to benefit from shorter form IMHO.

Scala's Seq[T] is a sequential container (pretty much anything array-like), so there is precedent.

-- 
Dmitry Olshansky

On Wednesday, 8 July 2015 at 01:26:22 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
>> A sequence of aliases, personally I think it is a much better name. But maybe seq could be replaced with something else, though I don't really mind seq. AliasList seems a little bit better.
>
> it's far closer to a tuple, list, or array than a sequence.

Mmh, TypeTuple had 2 problems, it didn't solely consist of types, and the term tuple is overloaded by value tuples.
But indeed AliasTuple would be descriptive name IMHO.

On Wednesday, 8 July 2015 at 08:53:52 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> On Wednesday, 8 July 2015 at 01:26:22 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
>>> A sequence of aliases, personally I think it is a much better name. But maybe seq could be replaced with something else, though I don't really mind seq. AliasList seems a little bit better.
>>
>> it's far closer to a tuple, list, or array than a sequence.
>
> Mmh, TypeTuple had 2 problems, it didn't solely consist of types, and the term tuple is overloaded by value tuples.
> But indeed AliasTuple would be descriptive name IMHO.

Tuples are not expected to auto unpack either.

On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 22:22:02 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/7/2015 2:20 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 21:15:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> So I thought we were supposed to replace bad names with good names. Template
>>> arguments are indexable, so "sequence" doesn't quite apply.
>>
>> Apparently Walter was opposed to using List, as that would somehow imply "linked
>> list".
>
> I opposed it because lists are not indexable, and tuples are.

Linked lists are not indexable, but the term list doesn't necessarily imply that it's a linked list. The term list just means that you have a group of items in linear order. In fact, if you're looking for a generic name for any kind of linear group of items (be it a linked list or an array or whatever), I would think that list is about as generic as you get. And it says nothing about indexability one way or the other.

The core problem here is that the thing that we're trying to name here is too much of a hodgepodge of different things to name it well. It's not really a tuple, since it's not nestable, but list and sequence are kind of odd names too, because in programming, with almost everything other than a tuple, you expect all of the items in the structure to be the same type, which isn't the case here.

Going with Alias seems to solve the problem of whether it holds types or values or symbols well. It also deals well with whether it's used for arguments or parameters or something else. So, I think that going with Alias is a good move.

As for Seq, it's kind of ugly, but if understand that it's Sequence, I think that that fits well enough. Personally, I'd prefer List over Seq, but if you're vetoing List, then I don't know what else we're going to go with. _Nothing_ fits perfectly. TypeTuple/AliasSeq/Whatever is just too unique and too much of a hodgepodge for any name to really well.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Tuesday, 7 July 2015 at 21:15:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> So I thought we were supposed to replace bad names with good names. Template arguments are indexable, so "sequence" doesn't quite apply.
>
> What happened? Why are we replacing a crappy term with another crappy term?
>
>
> Andrei

What basically happened is that I discussed that with pretty much everybody (including you at DConf) and really, nothing better came up.