From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2004-03-04T13:40:24+09:00 Subject: Re: why are Hashes so unsorted? what's your solution? Hello Hal, Thursday, March 4, 2004, 12:07:15 AM, you wrote: HF> I'm as guilty as anyone else of saying "ordered hash." When I say it, HF> I mean a data structure whose elements can be addressed like an array, HF> but with a non-numeric key which is an arbitrary object. Those are HF> interface issues. The offical names are unordered collection (short form: collection), ordered collection, indexable collection or ordered indexable collection (for example avl-trees, red-black-trees, skip-lists and others). There is also no reason to associate a array access with integer indexes. HF> The term "hash" is so much more fun and elegant than "associative HF> array." Let's come up with a term that is both elegant and accurate HF> for an ordered entity with a hash-like interface. An hash is an associative array, and also a tree is a associative array, but a tree is never a hash. So there is no shorter name for your datastructure then "ordered indexable collection". -- Best regards, Lothar mailto:mailinglists@scriptolutions.com