Re: [PATCH v1 1/2] [troff]: Add lengthof() macro.

[Lennart Jablonka]

Quoth Alejandro Colomar:
> The good news is that I like the implementation.  I just don't like the
> name.  I have a sizeof_array() macro that does
>
> #define sizeof_array(a)  (sizeof(a) + must_be_array(a))
>
> That is, it calculates the size in bytes that the array takes up in memory.
>
> <https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/pull/762/commits/8d06d849dcb5f7041e048d866ec7ce6c1853245b>
>
> For a macro that returns the number of elements in an array, I'd like a
> name that cannot be confused with that at all.  NELEMS(), NITEMS(),
> array_count(), or lengthof() all seem better than array_size().
>
> I'm not a fan of lengthof(), even if it's a proposal to ISO C, as so far
> the term "length" was only the number of non-zero characters in a string,
> and overloading it to mean the number of elements in an array would
> similarly be a bad thing.  At least it's not so confusing as size, though.
>
> NITEMS() or NELEMS() seems the best choice to me.

I like both lengthof (as “length” is commonly used for the number 
of elements in an array) and nelem (which is what Plan 9 uses).   
I do wanna note that the term used by the C standard is “size” and 
the term used by the C++ standard is “bound.”   How about boundof?