[Mono-list] Delving in to System.Collections.Hashtable

[John Barnette]

Hey kids,

I could use the wisdom of somebody with a real CS education (or equivalent
mucking about) on this one.  I've been playing with various hashtable
implementations in C#, and I'm puzzling over the MS implementor docs for
Hashtable.  Based on a couple of comments in the docs I slotted the MS
Hashtable implementation as a separate-chaining hashtable, but now I'm not
absolutely certain.

SCHT, of course, is YA collision avoidance approach, so that

Bucket 0: tom
Bucket 1: dick -> harry
Bucket 2: marge -> homer -> lisa

entries with keys that hash identically are stored as a linked list.  Java's
java.util.HashMap is a pretty standard SCHT, for example.

When I look at System.Collections.IDictionaryEntry, though, I don't see a
'Next' attribute or anything else that would allow a linked list in this
fashion.  Plus, I don't think structs in C# are allowed to have data members
of the same type.

Any wisdom?  I'm perfectly happy with either constructive help or a "piss
off and let people with CS experience implement this." ;-)


~ j.