Re: Renaming map->dict, class->type?

On 26/11/2013, at 1:13 PM, Jeff Schultz wrote:
> 
> Good point.  "Map" shouldn't be overloaded.  "Dict" will be familiar to many scripting language programmers.

Which ones?  Perl calls them 'hashes'.  So does Ruby.
Javascript calls them 'objects'.  PHP calls them 'arrays'.

The Python documentation speaks of "mapping types" and has one
standard mapping type, "dict".  Off-hand, this is the only common
scripting language I know that uses that name.  So "_many_
scripting language programmers" = "_Python_ scripting language
programmers".

Erlang has a 'dict' module, but it's not normally thought of as
a scripting language, and an Erlang dict is not a distinct run-
time type, but made of pairs and tuples. There's an associative
term data type in the new release of Erlang, but it's called a 'map'.
(Joe Armstrong had argued for a thing he called a 'proper struct'
and I had argued for a thing I called a 'frame'; they were the
the same thing really.  Maps generalise those in a way I dislike.)
think misguided.)