Results! - The Big Array Size Survey for C
Happy New Year! It is time report the results of the Array Size Operator survey and answer some comments people have been asking for!
We were making a built-in operator for this, and that built-in operator was accepted into C2y, the next version of the C standard. The reason we wanted a built-in operator for this was to prevent the typical problems we have with macro, which (at least with the above definition) manifests a few issues:
Of course, the easier it is to understand the feature (3 bullets in a bulleted list and one code snippet), the more debate perverts crawl out of the woodwork to start getting their Bikeshedding-jollies in on things like the name. The flames of argumentation raged powerfully for an hour or so in the Committee, and the e-mails back and forth on the Committee Reflector were fairly involved. It spawned several spin-off papers trying to ascertain the history of the spelling of size functionality (see Jakub Łukasiewicz N3402: Words Used for Retrieving Number of Elements in Arrays and Array-like Objects Across Computer Languages), and even before hand had a survey conducted at ARM for it (see Chris Bazley’s N3350: Survey Results for Naming of New nelementsof() Operator).
I had my own opinions about the subject, but rather than wax poetical, I figured I’d follow Chris Bazley’s lead and just…. ask everyone. So, I just went and asked everyone.
