I use a language named AutoHotkey (or AHK), which allows
to automate Windows applications.
It still has lot of rough edges in its syntax, but it is
useful to help day to day tasks.
Currently, it has only a very primitive array system,
which is interesting by its concept, but is quite
limited:
In AHK, if var contains foo, array_name_%var% becomes
the array_name_foo variable. So we can have numerical
arrays (v = 1, a%v% is a1, like a[1]) and even
associative arrays (limited to the range of characters
allowed in variables names...).
A big limitation is that these arrays are hard to make
local, and nearly impossible to give as parameters to a
function or to return them.
So the author of the language plans to implement true
arrays.
I believe he should go one step further, and implement
associative arrays as well. And naturally, I took a look
at the way tables are implemented in Lua, knowing they
are efficient and easy to use.
Of course, I have (re)read the Implementation of Lua 5.0
paper, and even the Reducing the retrieval time of
scatter storage techniques one. The later is a bit too
theoretical for my taste, but I suppose I could manage to
get something out of it.
I also took a look at ltable.c, but without knowing
intimately the internals of Lua, it is hard to follow
(gnode, gkey?).
I believe that with lot of work, I can flatten this and
make it usable for my needs, but I thought I should first
ask if somebody did something like that before, so I
won't reinvent the wheel (or recut it to make it
oval...).
In other words, do somebody know some alternative
implementation, or has done some detailed analysis of
this algorithm or have some other material I could use?
In all cases, I will share my findings with the
community, of course.
--
Philippe Lhoste
-- (near) Paris -- France
-- http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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