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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.
A small phone book as a hash table. In computing, a hash table is a data structure that implements an associative array, also called a dictionary or simply map; an associative array is an abstract data type that maps keys to values. [2]
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.
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.
In the programming language C++, unordered associative containers are a group of class templates in the C++ Standard Library that implement hash table variants. Being templates , they can be used to store arbitrary elements, such as integers or custom classes.
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.
A hash array mapped trie [1] (HAMT) is an implementation of an associative array that combines the characteristics of a hash table and an array mapped trie. [1] It is a refined version of the more general notion of a hash tree.