Confused on creating a rectangle and validating its size & position afterwards

Question

If one creates a rectangle in a layer like this:
var childLayer = parentLayer.pathItems.rectangle(top, left, someWidth, someHeight);
childLayer.stroked = false;
childLayer.filled = true;
After creating the rectangle, would one read it back like this:
var bounds = childLayer.geometricBounds;
alert("bounds: "+bounds[0]+","+bounds[1]+","+bounds[2]+","+bounds[3]);
or should I use visibleBounds, or controlBounds? Or something else?
I know if stroke not used or can exclude can use geometric bounds? Or rather all 3 bounds could be the same in that case?
I'm confused right now because I'm assuming the bounds represent the four corners of the rectangle's position in the document and when read back out, the values (bounds[0] and bounds[1]) don't match against the top & left values originally passed in to create the rectangle. Shouldn't they be the same?
If not, how am I supposed to validate that the layer/object uses the same top & left values for it's position as when the rectangle was created (for say validation purposes)?
Also I assume I should be able to fetch the position of one corner using childLayer.top & childLayer.left as well right? For some reason, that doesn't match with top & left either.

Answer 1

Using your code snippet, I get same values. I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS6 (64-bit).
But using a slightly different snippet, adapted from original script code I'm working with:
var doc = app.activeDocument;
var finishedWidth = 6.74 * 72;
var finishedHeight = 4.84 * 72;
var top = (362.88 - finishedHeight) / 2;
var left = (502.56 - finishedWidth) / 2;
alert("orig left: "+left+", top: "+top+", width: "+finishedWidth+", height: "+finishedHeight);
var trimLayer = doc.pathItems.rectangle(top, left, finishedWidth, finishedHeight);
alert("done left: "+trimLayer.left+", top: "+trimLayer.top);
var bounds = trimLayer.geometricBounds;
alert("bounds: "+bounds[0]+","+bounds[1]+","+bounds[2]+","+bounds[3]);
the results are off regarding trimLayer.left & trimLayer.right compared to the original top & left values passed in. But the bounds values are correct. From your code snippet, I checked the rect.left and rect.top & it's still correct.
Here's the output of the alerts (with some rounding of values as opposed to what was displayed):
orig left: 8.64, top: 7.19, width: 485.28, height: 348.48
done left: 8.14, top: 7.7
bounds: 8.64,7.2,493.92,-341.28
and debugging the original script code, the script I'm working with, (the rect.left, rect.top and) the bounds don't match up, with a difference from 0.14 to 0.42 to the actual value it's supposed to be. Extracting the area of code that I'm debugging out (for generalization and sharing code) results in the snippet above, and for some reason there, outside the context of the full script, the bounds are correct but not the rect.left & rect.top. Unfortunately, can't share the rest of the code at present.
Guess I'll have to investigate further, with help from my team's developers. At the moment I'm perplexed by these variations. Logically, from reading the code & scripting reference, I would have expected the values to match up in all cases.