Daniel Weinreb <
dlw@google.com> writes:
> Friends,
>
> I wrote a little package for "fash hash tables", which provide an
> abstraction that is analogous to that of Common Lisp hash tables, but
> is faster for tables with few elements, and only slightly inferior for
> tables with many elements.
>
> I did this because performance analysis showed that our system was
> spending too much time in hash table operations, and using the new
> package helped.
>
> I have recently been cleaning this up, one reason being that I'd like
> to open source it. The function names used to be things like getfhash
> and mapfhash. Now they are like fhash:get and fhash:map-elements and
> so on.
>
> However, before I open-source it, I was to make sure it's "right". It
> recently occurred to me that the package name "fhash" has problems.
>
> Here are pros and cons of changing it that I can see.
>
> Pro: I's not a hash table in the small-cardinality case; it's a linear
> lookup. So the name is not actually accurate.
>
> Pro: Calling such a data structure a "hash table", even as Common Lisp
> does, is an abstraction violation. Whether it works by hashing is an
> implementation detail. The Java collection library calls this a Map.
> Python calls it a dictionary. Clojure calls it a map. Those are both
> better names.
>
> Con: Common Lisp already uses the name "hash table", so it would be
> easier for existing Common Lisp programmers to see the analogy.
>
> Advice? Thanks!