[pro] "fhash"

[Daniel Weinreb]

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!

Thanks!

-- Dan
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