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The program can create a complete text representation of any group of objects by calling these methods, which are almost always already implemented in the base associative array class. [ 23 ] For programs that use very large data sets, this sort of individual file storage is not appropriate, and a database management system (DB) is required.
In Java associative arrays are implemented as "maps", which are part of the Java collections framework. Since J2SE 5.0 and the introduction of generics into Java, collections can have a type specified; for example, an associative array that maps strings to strings might be specified as follows:
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 ...
The array, set and dictionary binary types are made up of pointers - the objref and keyref entries - that index into an object table in the file. This means that binary plists can capture the fact that - for example - a separate array and dictionary serialized into a file both have the same data element stored in them.
Length-prefixed "short" Strings (up to 64 bytes), marker-terminated "long" Strings and (optional) back-references Arbitrary-length heterogenous arrays with end-marker Arbitrary-length key/value pairs with end-marker
For function that manipulate strings, modern object-oriented languages, like C# and Java have immutable strings and return a copy (in newly allocated dynamic memory), while others, like C manipulate the original string unless the programmer copies data to a new string.
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 array languages, operations are generalized to apply to both scalars and arrays. Thus, a+b expresses the sum of two scalars if a and b are scalars, or the sum of two arrays if they are arrays. An array language simplifies programming but possibly at a cost known as the abstraction penalty.