Lenobj

Lenobj is a software construct used to represent a length value associated with a container, sequence, or stream. It encapsulates an integer length and exposes an API for querying and manipulating that length. Although not a standardized language feature, lenobj appears in several codebases as a lightweight abstraction intended to separate length calculations from the underlying data structure.

Design and data model

A lenobj typically stores a length field (an integer) and may optionally hold a reference to the source container whose length it represents. Implementations may be immutable or mutable, and some designs allow the length to be updated automatically when the source changes, while others rely on explicit updates. Common operations include get_length (to read the current length), is_empty (to check for zero length), and compare_to or equals (to compare lengths with other lenobj instances). Additional methods may allow adjusting the length by a delta, clamping to a minimum or maximum, or deriving a new lenobj from an existing one.

Behavior and semantics

Lenobj can be static, holding a fixed length, or dynamic, reflecting changes in the underlying container. Dynamic variants may implement observers or lazy evaluation so that the length is computed or refreshed on access. This flexibility makes lenobj suitable for performance-sensitive contexts where repeated length computations are expensive, or where length is part of a metadata model rather than the primary data.

Usage and applications

Lenobj is used to cache or convey length information in algorithms, streaming pipelines, text processing, and user interface layouts. It helps separate concerns by allowing components to reason about size without directly manipulating containers. It may appear in libraries that optimize frequent length checks or in testing utilities that need explicit length references.

See also

length, size, metadata, container, length-prefixed data.