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Re: propose renaming Hash to Dict
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From:
Daniel Hulme
Date:
June 1, 2007 03:45
Subject:
Re: propose renaming Hash to Dict
Message ID:
20070601104449.GA10938@istic.org
On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 11:44:53AM +0200, Thomas Wittek wrote:
> Larry Wall:
> > Nope. Hash is mostly about meaning, and very little about implementation.
> > Please don't assume that I name things according to Standard Names in
> > Computer Science. I name things in English. Hash is just something
> > that is disordered, which describes the associative array interface
> > rather nicely, distinguishing it from the ordered Array interface.
> I'm not a native english speaker, but I've never heard or read the word
> "hash" outside CS.
I suppose that as a non-native English speaker you've never eaten
"corned beef hash". I quote from Wikipedia:
"Hash is a mixture of beef (often leftovers of corned beef or roast
beef), onions, potatoes, and spices that are mashed together into a
coarse, chunky paste, and then cooked, either alone, or with other
ingredients."
It's a bit of a working-class dish, for using up your leftovers, so not
the sort of thing you'd eat as a tourist, but it seems many other
countries have the same sort of thing: using your leftovers is a pretty
universal need.
In colloquial English there's also the expression, "to make a hash of
something," which means to make a mess of it, to screw up.
That said, the dish and the idiom are both dying out, and the current
generation of school leavers might not have heard of either. I didn't
make the connection until Larry described it as being "disordered".
As a general point, I think it's pretty easy to make a mental
distinction between a 5ish hash and a hashtable, just as it's easy to
remember that 5's abstracted lists and arrays aren't the same concepts
as linked lists and C-style concrete arrays.
--
"It must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is,
cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the
magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel."
-- British Cavalry training manual, 1907 ::: http://surreal.istic.org/
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