[Development] Proposal: Deprecate QVector in Qt 6

[André Pönitz]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 10:06:07AM +0200, Albert Astals Cid via Development wrote:
> El dijous, 23 d’abril de 2020, a les 9:43:33 CEST, Simon Hausmann va escriure:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > In dev we've had QVector being an alias for QList for a while now. For the
> > 6.0 release this particular topic (QList/QVector) suggests two goals (among
> > others):
> > 
> >     (1) Use the same type throughout the public API of Qt.
> > 
> >     (2) Make it easy for our users to maintain a code base that works with
> > Qt 5 and 6.
> > 
> > 
> > In the light of those two goals, I think we should keep using QList as the
> > type in the public API. I don't think we should do a search and replace
> > activity and switch to QVector. In the light of that, I would like to
> > propose simply deprecating QVector and stick to QList everywhere.
> > 
> > 
> > What do you think?
> 
> As taught in Computer Science/Engineering courses:
>  * QList is not a list
>  * QVector is a vector

"vector" in this context is a misnomer. It does not "carry" something
from one place to another, it does not have a direction, it's (generally)
not an element of a vector space etc.

"list" is the better word already. To lists can be appended etc, operations
that do not apply to elemens of vector spaces. "array" as some ordered
arrangment would be in principle ok, to, but see below.

> Compating to std:: types:
>  * QList is not comparable to a std::list
>  * QVector is comparable to a std::vector
> 
> Personally i think it makes sense to keep the QVector name.

The problem is that this triggers tons of practically needless
renamings in tons of user code without actual gain.

And as QVector is longer than QList, this in turn will trigger 
reformatting due to exceeded line lenght limits. Etc.

Effectively only pain, no gain.

Andre'