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Discussion on: What are some alternatives to the word "type"?

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Nathan Bland

Most of the time if I'm doing document/table design for a data structure, I'll end up using something like itemType, but after looking at this post and thinking on it a bit, some other seemingly good options would seem to be:

purpose

label

and perhaps, mold.

purpose I like in that it conveys the meaning of the thing, eg. "this thing is meant to be an array", where as label is a bit shorter to type, but could be confused for another more useful property on a data item.

mold is nice because it is shorter to type, but a bit more ambiguous in terms of what it could be referencing.

/my2cents