Rosebud. Or is it RoseBud? (Hashtable)
Last night at the WinProTeam .NET UG Rockville Meeting, Carney Clegg spoke on "Using Hashtables Effectively".
Of course, my burning question on Hashtables was ...
Why is it Hashtable and not HashTable as the .NET Design Guidelines would indicate?
The question went unanswered last night with only my guess that it was kept the same to keep transitioning Java developers happy. Chris Mohan did some research and posted the real answer (below) on the AspNetMetroArea mailing list this morning - thanks Chris!
| "In the early days of the BCL design we heavily debated the name of this class. Some felt it should be HashTable and others felt is should be Hashtable (lower case t in table). There was ample prior art for both choices, so it really came down to what fit best in our library. The Pascal naming convention we adopted suggests that each word should begin with an initial uppercase character. So the debate boiled down to the question of what this class is. Is this class a table of hashes, that is, a Hash Table, or is it a single entity, a Hashtable. I think it is likely that the history of the data structure is a special kind of table, but in the end we decided the data structure had entered the common lexicon as a single word-- Hashtable." -- Brad Adams, Primary Author of the .Net Framework Design Guidelines |
If you are completely lost by the Rosebud reference, watch this. (Thanks Bob!)