Naming and composability?

[timholy]

Leftover from JuliaLang/julia#15648 (comment).

Clearly I'm late for bikeshedding the name, but I'm not sure that name conveys the way in which they are flexible...I keep thinking of wobbly windows! I do think OffsetArrays is a better name, and wonder whether you could combine forces?

More importantly, this seems to combine the functionality of OffsetArrays and FixedSizeArrays. If OffsetArrays were implemented as a thin-wrapper around an arbitrary array type, wouldn't this be more composable?

[eschnett]

Thank you! I didn't dare publicly ask for a better name (http://goo.gl/mV9MvD) , and "Flexible" was just the best thing with which I could come up. I don't like the name myself either.

Much of the generated code depends on which dimensions have a fixed size and which don't, and which dimensions have a fixed lower bound and which don't. (It's flexible in this respect!) So the array length might or might not be fixed.

The particular use case I needed was an array where all lower bounds are 0 (for convenience), and where the first dimension is fixed, but the second is arbitrary, as in (0:3, 0:*). This led to noticeable performance benefits in my application, which has inner loops that manipulate several arrays that each have several dimensions, some fixed, some not.

I looked at FixedSizeArrays and ImmutableArrays. Both are similar to FlexibleArrays, in the case of arrays with a fixed length. FixedSizeArrays seems to allow arbitrary choices for the underlying type -- a very neat idea, if the array length is fixed.

So maybe OffsetArraysMaybeFixedLowerBoundMaybeFixedSizeMaybeFixedLengthMaybeImmutableArrays...? Or maybe just GenericArrays. (Or EmacsArrays.)

[timholy]

OffsetArraysMaybeFixedLowerBoundMaybeFixedSizeMaybeFixedLengthMaybeImmutableArrays would certainly make everyone appreciate the wonders of tab completion. Let's go with that 😉.

I hadn't properly appreciated just how flexible this all is, and I certainly shouldn't comment on implementation without understanding it better!

[eschnett]

Wait... I really don't like the current name, do you have a suggestion?

[timholy]

Maybe CustomBoundsArrays?

[timholy]

Or UnrolledBoundsArrays?