Hi, 

This message is a follow up to a question posed at last night's 
WinProTeam's Rockville user group meeting. Note, the following 
informating is pretty esoteric, so.. unless you are interested in 
the nuances of naming/casing convetions.. you will likely have 
little interest in what's below.

That said, here's the message:

Carney Clegg gave a great presentation, "Using Hashtables 
Effectively"; during the Q/A an audience member asked why the class 
name was written with a lower t, ie: "Hashtable" rather than 
HashTable with a capital "T". 

When he posed the question, I thought I had read something about 
this but could not remember.  The questioner pointed out that the 
casing of the name is inconsistent with the FCL's naming/casing 
conventions but is consistent with java's naming/casing of its 
hashtable class implementation.

So, this morning I found where i had read the answer to the 
question.  The following is taken from the book ".Net Framework 
Standard Library Annotated Reference Volume 1: Base Class Library 
and Extended Numberics Library"

"In the early days of the BCL design we heavily debated the name of 
this class. Some felt it should be HashTable and others felt is 
should be Hashtable (lower case t in table).  There was ample prior 
art for both choices, so it really came down to what fit best in our 
library.  The Pascal naming convention we adopted suggests that each 
word should begin with an initial uppercase character. So the debate 
boiled down to the question of what this class is.  Is this class a 
table of hashes, that is, a Hash Table, or is it a single entity, a 
Hashtable.  I think it is likely that the history of the data 
structure is a special kind of table, but in the end we decided the 
data structure had entered the common lexicon as a single word-- 
Hashtable."  -- Brad Adams, Primary author of the .Net framework 
Design Guidelines and and the Common Language Spec




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