From: David Naseby <david.naseby@...>
Date: 2004-03-04T08:46:19+09:00
Subject: Re: why are Hashes so unsorted? what's your solution?

>From: Gavin Sinclair [mailto:gsinclair@soyabean.com.au]
>
>On Thursday, March 4, 2004, 10:07:15 AM, Hal wrote:
>
>> [good comments snipped]
>
>> The term "hash" is so much more fun and elegant than "associative
>> array." Let's come up with a term that is both elegant and accurate
>> for an ordered entity with a hash-like interface.
>
>When I was at uni, we were taught that the interface was "dictionary"
>(maps keys to values) and the common implementations are hash, tree,
>...
>
>There's only so much you can reasonably dissociate interface from
>implementation here, though: hashes are unordered; binary trees have
>three orders to choose from!  And of course people care about
>performance and choose different implementations for different data
>sets and use cases.

Since I was the one that made the original gaffe that caused the
Lothar-tirade that led to this, I feel I should weigh in again. I used
"ordered hash" to speak in the language of the OP, and like Hal, I was
pretty much just describing the interface rather than the implementation. To
kill much further talk on the topic, theres a good book review on Slashdot
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/19/2257203) of a good data
structure book (Osakasi's Purely Functional Data Structures). 

David Naseby