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There is no standard implementation of associative arrays in C, but a 3rd-party library, C Hash Table, with BSD license, is available. [1] Another 3rd-party library, uthash, also creates associative arrays from C structures. A structure represents a value, and one of the structure fields serves as the key. [2]
The most frequently used general-purpose implementation of an associative array is with a hash table: an array combined with a hash function that separates each key into a separate "bucket" of the array. The basic idea behind a hash table is that accessing an element of an array via its index is a simple, constant-time operation.
In the hash table implementation of associative arrays, an array of length is partially filled with elements, where . A key x {\displaystyle x} is hashed using a hash function h {\displaystyle h} to compute an index location A [ h ( x ) ] {\displaystyle A[h(x)]} in the hash table, where h ( x ) < m {\displaystyle h(x)<m} .
In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x) will result in an array y whose elements are sine of the corresponding elements of the array x. Vectorized index operations are also supported.
As a single concrete data structure may be used to implement many abstract data types, some data structures may appear in multiple comparisons (for example, a hash map can be used to implement an associative array or a set).
The disadvantage of association lists is that the time to search is O(), where n is the length of the list. [3] For large lists, this may be much slower than the times that can be obtained by representing an associative array as a binary search tree or as a hash table.
For example, a priority queue is often implemented as a heap, while an associative array is often implemented as a hash table, so these abstract types are often referred to by this preferred implementation, as a "heap" or a "hash", though this is incorrect conceptually.
An associative container uses an associative array, map, or dictionary, composed of key-value pairs, such that each key appears at most once in the container. The key is used to find the value, the object, if it is stored in the container. Associative containers are used in programming languages as class templates.