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/
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
