Re: Scheme style auto-resizing hashtable

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu>]

jglascoe@jay.giss.nasa.gov writes:
> and another thing,
> 
> I'm going to completely re-haul make-hashtab to accept one optional
> argument: either an alist or a vector of associations.  I figure my hash
> tables do an excellent job of choosing (and modifying) max-bucket-size,
> and they resize so quickly that an initial number-buckets of 4 is more
> than adequate.  As for the auto-shrink argument, well the user will just
> have to call hashtab-(en|dis)able themselves.
> 
> Now, why the optional alist/vector of associations argument?  I figure
> that someone using an alist that grows larger than they expected (say
> >100) can easily trade it in for a hash table.  And any good avl-tree
> will probably have avl->alist and avl->vector procedures.
> 

I'd suggest providing alist->hashtab (and hashtab->alist or at least
hashtab-keys) instead of overloading the constructor. I'm not sure
association vectors are very useful - they don't offer either
performance or flexibility, though I suppose they are about easy to
iterate on as alists.

 - Maciej