Editorial: normalisation around List construction

[michaelficarra]

No description provided.

[gibson042]

Suggested change

	1. Let _s_ be a List whose elements are the characters of _Input_ at indices _xe_ (inclusive) through _ye_ (exclusive).
	1. Let _s_ be a List containing the characters of _Input_ at indices _xe_ (inclusive) through _ye_ (exclusive).

Or perhaps better, replace all the potentially ambiguous "List containing..." text with "List whose elements are...".

[michaelficarra]

Do you think we should try to normalise that phrasing everywhere?

[gibson042]

Yes, I do.

[michaelficarra]

Okay, I can do that as a follow-up PR. I also prefer "whose elements are".

[bakkot]

There's still 29 uses of "a new List". I see those are all single-item lists. Did you intentionally skip those?

For single-element lists, we use all of:

• "a new List containing _x_"
• "a List containing _x_"
• "a List containing only _x_"
• "a List containing the one element which is _x_"
• "a List containing the single element, _x_".

I would like those to get normalized as well, though I guess it need not be in this PR. My preference for these cases is to say "a List whose sole element is _x_", to match "a List whose elements are".

[jmdyck]

For single-element lists, there's also one occurrence of:

• a List whose sole item is _arg_

(Note "item" not "element".)

[michaelficarra]

@bakkot There's also hundreds of list literals using double angle brackets.

Let methodNames be « "toString", "valueOf" ».

We can address this inconsistency in a follow-up PR.