collectionsCounter

collectionsCounter is a lightweight utility designed to tally the frequency of elements in a collection. It maintains a mapping from elements to their non-negative integer counts and updates incrementally as elements are added or removed.

Core functionality typically includes adding elements, retrieving counts, and exporting the current tally. Common methods are increment(element, amount=1), getCount(element), totalCount(), distinctCount(), and items() or entries() that expose the underlying element-count pairs. Some implementations support bulk updates from another collection, or merging with another counter. Many variants also provide a way to reset or clear all counts.

Use cases for collectionsCounter span data analysis and processing tasks. It is well suited for word frequency analysis, itemized inventories, event counting, or constructing histograms. The concept is language-agnostic and can be implemented with a hash map or similar data structure; mutable versions update in place, while functional variants may return new counters on updates.

Performance considerations include linear-time construction and space proportional to the number of distinct elements. Building a counter over n elements typically runs in O(n) time with O(k) space, where k is the number of distinct keys. Updates are usually O(1) on average when powered by hash-based maps. In multi-threaded environments, synchronization or concurrent data structures may be required to ensure correctness.

Variants and related concepts include Multiset, histogram, and language-specific implementations such as Python’s collections.Counter or analogous utilities in other ecosystems. CollectionsCounter can be extended with features like normalization, serialization, or weighted counts to fit specific analysis needs.