[Gllug] What is a hash?

[Nix]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2001, Warwick Harvey said:
> Erm, I thought the "hash" character was #.

No, that's the mesh (according to Intercal) or the octothorpe (thanks to
Don Macpherson, who invented it, and an Olympic athlete; see
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oct1.htm>).

;)

> I also thought (though I'm not a perl programmer) that associative arrays in
> perl were called hashes because they were implemented using a hash table (no
> idea whether they are or not, I just assumed so :).

Exactly so. A silly name, they should have been called `maps', IMHO,
because that's what they *do*.

-- 
`It's all about bossing computers around. Users have to say "please".
Programmers get to say "do what I want NOW or the hard disk gets it".'
                        -- Richard Heathfield on the nature of programming

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