On Monday, 22 August 2016 at 07:00:23 UTC, brian wrote:
On Monday, 22 August 2016 at 06:19:00 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
Terminology wise, we distinguish between associative arrays
(AA) and arrays. The former should never simply be called
'array', otherwise people will assume you are referring to
either or both of foo[] (dynamic array/slice) or foo[N] (where
N is an integer constant, a static array). Change your title
to 'Creating an AA of user-defined structs' and the
misunderstanding goes away.
That's a terribly confusing naming convention for beginners
then! :P
Is this D-specific terminology, or is this a more general
convention that AA are not actually arrays?
This might help my understanding of when to use or not use one
or the other. :)
Listen to Mike. This is not specific to D and they are only
arrays in name.
I want to provide other examples because I think I come across
this with other words in English. Where one thing uses the name
of another, but there really isn't enough similarities that it
would make sense to refer to them in the same bucket.
In your case though it is similar to square vs rectangle. If you
are trying to understand some properties about squares, you could
talk about having a rectangle, but it is more helpful to be
specific. Consider asking how to find the area of a rectangle,
you'll get the answer "length * height" while asking to finding
the area of a square you might get "length^2"
