Re: Scheme style auto-resizing hashtable (fwd)

[Jay Glascoe <jglascoe@jay.giss.nasa.gov>]

On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Tel wrote:

> > so what do I have here?  "dictionary" and "meaningful identifiers". hmm.
> > I also considered using "hash-table" (used by CL, so I just said "No."),
> > "assoc-array" (one letter longer than "dictionary", you lose), and even
> > "auto-hash" (where did that come from?).
> 
> Hash tables don't maintain order of the keys. Dictionaries are in
> alphabetical order (last time I looked at a paper one was a while back).
> You have to be a little bit careful when freely associating concepts.
> 

woops!  *blush*, I didn't grep the dictionary <-> ordered entries thing.

I don't want to keep my entries ordered!

but is "ordered entries" really an integral attribute of dictionaries?
Aren't paper dictionaries ordered because people can't hash the word
they're looking up in their heads?  Or is e.g., "aardvark" somehow related
to the Aare River in Switzerland?

> "last time I looked at a paper one was a while back"

right, on-line dictionaries can internally store their entries in whatever
order they darn well please.  Does this make any difference to the user? 
Does this make, e.g. http://www.m-w.com/ not a *real* dictionary?

As a final defense: Python's hash tables are called dictionaries.
They're certainly not ordered.  But I've never heard anyone in the
Python community gripe about not having an "ordered_items()" method.

<lots o' stuff snipped, I'm still digesting it>

> 	- Tel
> 

	Jay