[martincmartin]

You see this in programming languages too. Many languages distinguish between one of something and a collection of them, e.g. int x vs vector<int> x. In other languages, like Matlab, everything's a vector, and a scalar is just a vector of length one.

[burnished]

Well, its not that they distinguish between one of something and a collection, its that one of something is different from a collection of things. So, int x is a handle to an integer value, whereas an array handle (your collection) is a handle to a pointer, which points to the start of your data structure and you can get the other elements by using an offset etc. etc. My point being that they are differentiated because they are different things.