Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> whispere
d:
| > Arrays are ordered. Hashes are not. Sure, you can iterate over a hash,
| > but add an element to one and you can change the order of everything in
| > it.
|
| Formally, I believe it's permissable for a hash implementation to return a
| different order the second time you iterate through it from the first
What stops us from imposing order on this chaos? If they are currently
defined as not having any specific order, why can't we say they always
return in numeric || alphabetic || ASCII || whatever order we want?
The internal storage implementation can be kept seperate from the external
interface. A hash *should* be able to be advantageous over an array in
just about all respects, except maybe size. And, we've shown how a sparse
array can be handled in a hash without any special machinations.
-spp
