Counter Class -- Bag/Multiset

[Chris Rebert]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Giovanni Bajo <rasky at develer.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:11:37 -0800, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>
>> The collections module in Python 2.7 and Python 3.1 has gotten a new
>> Counter class that works like bags and multisets in other languages.
>>
>> I've adapted it for Python2.5/2.6 so people can start using it right
>> away:
>>   http://docs.python.org/dev/library/collections.html#counter-objects
>>
>> Here's a link to the docs for the new class:
>>   http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576611/
>
> Hi Raymond,
>
> * I'm not a native speaker, but why use the word "Counter"? A "counter"
> to my ear sounds like a number that is increased each time an event
> occurs; the website counter, eg, comes to mind. I can understanda its
> meaning probably stretches to "an object that counts", but I really can't
> think of it as a group of object, or a container of object. Moreover, I
> find it a much more useful abstraction the idea of a "multi-set" (that
> is, a set where elements can appear with multiple cardinality), rather
> than stressing the concept of "counting" how many times each element
> appears in the set.
>
> * I find it *very* confusing c.items() vs c.elements(). Items and
> elements are synonymous (again, in my understanding of English).

I concur and would like to say additionally that having Counter's
len() be the number of *unique* items as opposed to just the number of
items seems a bit counterintuitive.

Cheers,
Chris

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