Hacker News Reader

But not PHP (where an array is actually a dictionary, too...), Perl, Swift, or most scientific languages like Matlab and R. C-influenced languages usually differentiate between "arrays" and "lists"/"vectors", but that's just convention.

Java, of course, calls its standard general-purpose list implementation both "array" and "list."

View on HN

Java doesn’t call any of its List implementations “array”. There’s ArrayList, which just means a list implemented on top of an array (actually multiple arrays in the general case, since it has to switch between arrays when increasing capacity). It doesn’t mean that it is an array, any more than a stack implemented on top of an array is an array (it isn’t).

> C-influenced languages usually differentiate between “arrays” and “lists”/“vectors”

On that note, Swift is in the process of introducing a fixed-size array type which they intend to call “Vector”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com