An alias method for count, as length ?

[Pankaj Doharey]

Hi All,

Currently in order to find the length of a string or count of a vector we only have one method "count".

(count "string")

Which sometimes does not exactly reflect the context of the code different verbs can mean different contexts. I think adding a small alias should improve 

the readability of the code. For instance :

(length "Helloworld")
=> 10
(count [1 2 3 4 5 6])
=> 6

Would make more sense.

Thanks in advance.

[Robert Levy]

That might have made sense to be in clojure.string IMO, but maybe too arbitrary of an addition to be worth it?  It's kind of like how concat in Clojure was called append in Common Lisp.  Neither one is necessarily worse, you just have to remember what it's called in the language you are using.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure Dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure-dev...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to cloju...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/clojure-dev.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Pankaj Doharey]

In my post i outlined that the addition would give us two things, First convenience and second better readability. 

The change required is quite small, and i suppose this has to be done for a host of methods in clojure including 

your aforementioned concat and append. Both are good in different contexts.

[Alex Miller]

Thanks for the idea, but we're not interested in adding aliases, either for this or in general.

Alex

[Robert Levy]

I don't discount that some might benefit from such aliases, either in a codebase or in a library.  I just don't agree that a proliferation of alias belong in the core of the language.  If anything it might make sense to have an "alternative core", but again that seems like something that should be developed as library.