In-Reply-To: <877e9a1704121705302ac4bce4@mail.gmail.com>

Not sure. In computer graphics you specifically talk about "axis-aligned bounding boxes". To me, "box" is the 3d version of "rectangle".

"Axis-aligned bounding boxes" reflects the importance of being explicit about whether your rectangles are axis-aligned, so I approve, but it's also a bit of a mouthful. I think a shorter name is needed. Some people use AABB, but I'm not keen on acronyms. I'm not keen on abbreviations, too, otherwise using Rect for the axis-aligned case and Rectangle for the general case might work. "Box" was an arbitrary suggestion, in that it does not say "axis aligned" of itself, but I can't think of anything better. For me, in a graphics application, "box" is a term of art which can be either 2d or 3d. Just as points and offsets can also be 2d or 3d (or 1d or 4d). If we care about conflicts with 3d stuff, then maybe we need to be explicit about this, perhaps by using namespaces. Arguably we shouldn't care, because a windowing system is pretty far away from a 3d graphics drawing system. As I realised towards the end of my previous post, perhaps we shouldn't care about 2d graphics, either. It's not so clear-cut because windowing is also 2d; it's easier to see a continuum between them. -- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK