ordered vs ordinal

[alecloudenback]

Maybe the ship has sailed, but would ordinal be a clarifying terminology change? I was confused when I first saw the first call below because I thought ordered=true would be saying that the array is already sorted.

x = CategoricalArray(["Old", "Young", "Middle", "Young"], ordered=true)
levels!(x, ["Young", "Middle", "Old"])

might become

x = CategoricalArray(["Old", "Young", "Middle", "Young"], ordinal=true)
order!(x, ["Young", "Middle", "Old])

[bkamins]

Well it is pre 1.0 release, but it would be quite a big change. Let us see what @nalimilan thinks 😄.

[ablaom]

I can see where this is coming from but must admit this never confused me, as an outside user. I do like that order! is a verb while levels! is a noun. For my part however, I feel this is a very minor semantic point, and would prefer to avoid the substantial disruption.

[nalimilan]

The "ordered" terminology comes from R. Probably "ordinal" would have been a better term, but I'm not convinced that changing it now would be worth the breakage either. Note that in Julia the term referring to data that is already sorted would be... "sorted" (as in searchsortedfirst and SortedDict; see also occurrences in packages).