Adjective meaning "with gaps" or "with holes" [closed]

Question

Is there a word that describes a list of items containing stretches of empty slots?

FOr instance, suppose I wrote this list on a piece of paper:

[1, 5, 23, 97, empty, empty, empty, 56, 234, empty, empty, 5464, 434, 4543, empty, 434, ...]

Is there a word to describe such a list?

[This is an edit of the original question reproduced below, in an effort to keep it on-topic]

I'm trying to name a data structure that consists of a list of values with a number of empty stretches between them. That is, the structure represents something like this:

[1, 5, 23, 97, empty, empty, empty, 56, 234, empty, empty, 5464, 434, 4543, empty, 434, ...]

I'm looking for an adjective that means "it has gaps", so I can name it AdjectiveList.

Something like GapToothedList, but using a single-word adjective so it is more concise. I might go with GapList, but I'd prefer a real adjective rather than an aposition.

Answer 1

You would probably get a better answer on a mathematics or computer science forum. But one candidate is sparse, defined in Wiktionary as:

(mathematics) Having few nonzero elements

It is particularly used of matrices: a sparse matrix is according to Wikipedia

a matrix in which most of the elements are zero. There is no strict definition regarding the proportion of zero-value elements for a matrix to qualify as sparse but a common criterion is that the number of non-zero elements is roughly equal to the number of rows or columns. By contrast, if most of the elements are non-zero, the matrix is considered dense.

There are also sites that use terms like sparse array, for instance the Python library SciPy Sparse Arrays module scipy.sparse.

Answer 2

In a situation where humor is acceptable holey might work. It means "having holes" and is a homophone of holy.

Answer 3

If an adjective is required, “gap” can simply be replaced by “gapped”. If this is relatively rare usage in standard English, “GappedList” seems perfectly acceptable as the name of a programming data structure.

Answer 4

In IT, this would be a sparse list or array, and your favorite programming language likely already has an implementation: here's sparse-list for Python. The name comes from the mathematical concept of a sparse matrix, which is a mostly empty two-dimensional array.

However, sparse-anything (sparse file, sparse network, etc) in IT implies that there's magic happening behind the scenes to compress it. For example, if you have a sparse list of a single one followed by a million zeroes, it would be stored in some type of hashmap/dict, squeezing it into a couple of bytes:

{ 0: 1, default: 0 }

This is much more space-efficient and possibly faster to process than a regular list, which would require a million bytes to store:

[1, 0, 0, 0, 0, ...]

So if you're naming an instance of a regular list as sparse_list, code readers are likely to assume it's a special sparse list type. If you're actually implementing a sparse list data structure, the name is of course fine.

Answer 5

• Porous: "With many gaps"
• Perforated: "Pierced with holes"

Answer 6

The word you want is lacunary, which means "relating to lacunae", which is just English, as usual, running off to Latin for a fancy word, in this case one meaning "gaps".

The only problem with "lacunary" is that the only people who will recognize it are mathematicians who have come across the subject of lacunary series.

Answer 7

It might help if we knew what the values are for or why there would be missing ones. As for the words you could use; Unfulfilled data, Void points, since a void lacks anything, Unnecessary data, but again I don't know if the same point would be filled later, Unused, if this is for a item check and not all checks apply to the current item.

I hope these suggestions at least get your mind in the right direction for what you are going for.

Answer 8

Other possible words in ordinary English include: partial, incomplete and fragmentary, although some of these don’t have the right technical definition in mathematics. For example, a partial series is the finite sum of the first terms of a series, which is not what you are talking about here.