Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

5
  • 2
    Okay, but in actual implementation, doesn't the table.get("Chris") still have to traverse the table to find Chris? How does it know Chris is at a "key" value? When it hashes, what is the actually happening to "Chris"? Commented Nov 12, 2008 at 1:41
  • Good question. Will address in a separate answer... If you're impatient, try checking out the Wikipedia article. Commented Nov 12, 2008 at 1:43
  • @me.yahoo.com: see my comment below for this (couldn't write here because of size limitation) Commented Nov 12, 2008 at 1:47
  • 3
    NO. A hash table does not ever traverse. It computes a hash of "Chris" and that's the physical slot in the hash table that will have "Chris" as the key. The hash is a computation on the byte values (see MD5 algorithm for details.) Commented Nov 12, 2008 at 10:41
  • thanks for your answer - but how is the hashtable different from say, a dictionary? they both have keys/value pairs. so i'm confused about their difference(s). Commented Feb 5, 2016 at 2:55