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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.
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.
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]
A name–value pair, also called an attribute–value pair, key–value pair, or field–value pair, is a fundamental data representation in computing systems and applications. Designers often desire an open-ended data structure that allows for future extension without modifying existing code or data.
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 ).
Perl 5.6.1 and newer support autovivification of file and directory handles. [3] Calling open() on an undefined variable will set it to a filehandle. According to perl561delta, "[t]his largely eliminates the need for typeglobs when opening filehandles that must be passed around, as in the following example:
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 ...