Possible Duplicate:
count vs length vs size in a collection
In Java in particular, on Strings, you call string.length(), whereas in Lists you call list.size(). Is there a technical difference between the two terms, seeing as a String is really just a list of chars?
Any comments appreciated.
Ideally, count would be the number of items, and size would be the amount of storage taken up (as in sizeof).
In practice, all three (including length, which is the most ambiguous) are muddled up in many widely-used libraries, so there's no point trying to impose a pattern on them at this stage.
I don't think so. It is more likely caused by the API being work on a large team and different people have different take on what the name should be, especially with words that synonym in certain context, such as size and length in this matter.