The paper talks a lot about the name colony, and that the name “bag” isn’t a good fit. I want to see if we can have other good names (or name pieces) get discussed on the mailing list.
For picking names, I like using a name as a way to compare and contrast against similar choices. Ideally, the name should indicate why you would use one facility over another.
The big reasons I see to prefer colony over another container:
- Pointer and iterator stability
- Contiguous block storage for faster iteration (i.e. not a node based container)
- O(1) inserts and deletes
- Re-orderable / sortable
What distinguishes colony from slot_map? Is it the lack of "keys"? Is a colony basically a slot_set?
I’m leaning towards “stable_bundle”. “bundle” communicates a bit of disorganization.
Or a bit of organization, in the sense that a bundle of papers (or network cables) is more organized than a non-bundle thereof.
Anyway, "bundle" already has meaning in one of my particular codebases, whereas "colony" does not — and neither of them is at all useful for understanding what this thing actually is — so I'd vastly prefer to stick with the name it's already got.
The time to argue over bikeshed-paint-color is when you're planning to build a brand new bikeshed. There's no point re-painting a bikeshed that was already built years ago.
(See also: unique_function, function_ref. ;))
–Arthur