Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In Lua, "table" is a fundamental type that can be used either as an array (numerical index, fast) or as an associative array. The keys and values can be of any type, except nil. The following focuses on non-numerical indexes. A table literal is written as { value, key = value, [index] = value, ["non id string"] = value }. For example:
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.
For example, one could define a dictionary having a string "toast" mapped to the integer 42 or vice versa. The keys in a dictionary must be of an immutable Python type, such as an integer or a string, because under the hood they are implemented via a hash function. This makes for much faster lookup times, but requires keys not change.
A small phone book as a hash table. In computer science, 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]
Python's built-in dict class can be subclassed to implement autovivificious dictionaries simply by overriding the __missing__() method that was added to the class in Python v2.5. [5] There are other ways of implementing the behavior, [ 6 ] [ 7 ] but the following is one of the simplest and instances of the class print just like normal Python ...
Similarly an array element update is a procedure consisting of three arguments, for example set_array(Array, vector(i,j), value), but many languages also provide syntax such as Array[i,j] = value. A construct in a language is syntactic sugar if it can be removed from the language without any effect on what the language can do: functionality and ...
Off-by-one errors are common in using the C library because it is not consistent with respect to whether one needs to subtract 1 byte – functions like fgets() and strncpy will never write past the length given them (fgets() subtracts 1 itself, and only retrieves (length − 1) bytes), whereas others, like strncat will write past the length given them.
Python dictionaries (a form of associative array) can also be directly iterated over, when the dictionary keys are returned; or the items() method of a dictionary can be iterated over where it yields corresponding key,value pairs as a tuple: