Historical how and why of hash tables

Length: 35 minutes

Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with associative data structures (hashes, dictionaries, associative arrays) in some language

Description

I will explain how hashes work in general and compare the implementations in the Perl and Python programming languages. I'll also discuss the non-hash implementation of similar language features in the earlier languages Lisp (1960ish) and SNOBOL (1965ish).

This talk will be suitable for:

people who have never heard of a hash table

people who know what it is but not how it works

people who know how it works but are interested in history

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