Slices and Dynamic Arrays

[Tony]

On Friday, 29 December 2017 at 23:13:20 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> The term "slice" is a bit overused in D, meaning a variety of 
> things. It doesn't help that some folks dislike the official 
> terminology. In general, a slice is a contiguous group of 
> elements. A slice of memory would be a contiguous block of 
> memory. A dynamic array therefore refers to a slice of memory 
> and could be called a slice, but it's also the case that using 
> the slice operater on a container is called slicing - e.g. 
> rbt[] would give you a range over the container rbt, and that 
> range is a slice of the container, but it's not an array at all.
>

For me, it is confusing to use "slice" and "dynamic array" as 
synonyms. My initial impression was that they must have different 
code underlying them, and different behavior. I would pick one or 
the other. It should be:

D Arrays
   - Static
   - Dynamic

or

D Arrays
    - Static
    - Slice


The DLang Tour has a section on Slices that says in bold "Slices 
and dynamic arrays are the same". I think that sentence deserves 
an explanation as to why there are two terms being utilized for 
the same thing. I would prefer that "slice" as a noun was used 
only for the time when a dynamic array was initialized from a 
slice of another array. Or better yet - slice was never used as a 
noun - only a verb or adjective: took a slice of array A to form 
a slice dynamic array B (or slice-intialized dynamic array B).

D Arrays
    - Static
    - Dynamic
       - Slice-Initialized Dynamic