Terminology/naming convention for queue operations/APIs?

Question

The "queue", or FIFO, is one of the most common data structures, and have native implementations in many languages and frameworks. However, there seems to be little consensus as to how fundamental queue operations should be named. A survey of several popular languages show:

• Python: put / get
• C#, Qt : enqueue /dequeue
• Ruby, C++ STD: push / pop
• Java: add / remove

If one need to implement a queue (say, in some embedded platform that does not have a native queue implementation already), what naming convention would be best? Enqueue/dequeue seem to be the most explicit, but is wordy; put/get is succinct but does not provide any hint as to the FIFO nature of the operations; push/pop seems to be suggest stack operations instead of queue operations.

Answer 1

I'm kind of a pedant, so I'd go with enqueue/dequeue.

Though add/next has a certain appeal.

Just to cloud the issue a little more, in Perl it's push/shift. :)

Answer 2

push/pop is plain wrong for a fifo as these are stack (first in last out) operations.

queue can refer to the object as well as an operation so is a bit overloaded and dequeue can cause confusion because it was commonly used to refer to a double ended queue.

put/get - short, obvious and generic (doesn't assume an implementation and can be used for all sorts of queues/lists/collections) - what's not to like?

Answer 3

I'll probably name it as push_back and pop_front.