This is quite standard in the functional programming world; Common LISP, Scala, and Haskell all use "vector" to refer to (usually growable) contiguous-memory arrays with efficient random access, as opposed to "lists" with efficient append and prepend but inefficient random access.
I might be nitpicking but in Haskell and typical lisps “lists” don’t have efficient append. They are basically singly linked lists. A structure with efficient append and prepend (sometimes called a deque) is implemented as a finger tree in Haskell (with logarithmic random access), and as a vector of arrays in C++ (constant random access).
