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As in Perl 5, Perl 6 default hashes are flat: keys are strings and values are scalars. One can define a hash to not coerce all keys to strings automatically: these are referred to as "object hashes", because the keys of such hashes remain the original object rather than a stringification thereof.
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.
In mathematical terms, an associative array is a function with finite domain. [1] It supports 'lookup', 'remove', and 'insert' operations. The dictionary problem is the classic problem of designing efficient data structures that implement associative arrays. [2] The two major solutions to the dictionary problem are hash tables and search trees.
Strings in Python can be concatenated by "adding" them (with the same operator as for adding integers and floats), e.g. "spam" + "eggs" returns "spameggs". If strings contain numbers, they are added as strings rather than integers, e.g. "2" + "2" returns "22". Python has various string literals:
For example, let n be significantly less than 2 b. Consider a pseudorandom number generator function P(key) that is uniform on the interval [0, 2 b − 1]. A hash function uniform on the interval [0, n − 1] is n P(key) / 2 b. We can replace the division by a (possibly faster) right bit shift: n P(key) >> b.
Each character in the string key set is represented via individual bits, which are used to traverse the trie over a string key. The implementations for these types of trie use vectorized CPU instructions to find the first set bit in a fixed-length key input (e.g. GCC 's __builtin_clz() intrinsic function ).
In a dynamically typed language, where type can only be determined at runtime, many type errors can only be detected at runtime. For example, the Python code a + b is syntactically valid at the phrase level, but the correctness of the types of a and b can only be determined at runtime, as variables do not have types in Python, only values do.
Historically, the data structure used as a string intern pool was called an oblist (when it was implemented as a linked list) or an obarray (when it was implemented as an array). Modern Lisp dialects typically distinguish symbols from strings; interning a given string returns an existing symbol or creates a new one, whose name is that string ...