On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 07:07:06AM -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote: > > On Jun 1, 2007, at 5:44 , 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. > > > >Hm, but with which would you explain a "hash" in plain english? > >What would be the closest equivalents in the real world? > > "...make a hash of things" (meaning, a mess) > "corned beef hash"
That's two people that have given the same list, but both have omitted the more common (in modern times) phrase "hash browned potatos" which is a hash of chopped potato, onion, and sometimetimes other things fried brown. I'll ignore the McDonald's version which hashes together just the potatos, since a collective of a single element is still a collective mathematically, but not usually considered so linguistically unless you've got a big enough advertising budget to pull it off. --
