From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-02-07T04:40:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Hashes versus Arrays

People may be over-complicating things a bit.

On Wednesday 03 February 2010 12:27:10 pm Jerome David Sallinger wrote:
> Can someone please explain how you would go about deciding whether to
> use a Hash or and Array for a given requirement.

Is it just a list of values, ordered or not? Put it in an Array. Example:

friends_list = ['Tom', 'Susie', 'Yosef']

A hash is an associative array, not necessarily sorted. Do you have things you 
need to associate?

people_list = {'Tom' => :friend, 'Joe' => :enemy}
people_list['Tom']            # should return :friend
people_list['Joe'] = :friend  #guess we made up

These are entirely different patterns. You almost never have a requirement 
that would make sense for either.

People are complicating this by the fact that arrays can be indexed by 
position. For example:

friends_list[1]   # who's my second friend?

But in high-level languages like Ruby, especially when you're starting out, 
you probably don't need to be doing that.

> Can someone give an
> idiot proof simple explanation

No. You're a programmer. If you're also an idiot, you end up on thedailywtf. 
"Idiot-proof programming" is neither.