Dictionaries

Dictionaries

A common problem in computing is that of keyed storage and retrieval. Specifically, we have a number of data items, each having a unique key. This key may be any type, and is used to find the associated data item; i.e., given a key we need to find the data item associated with that key. A data structure that provides this kind of access is called a dictionary. In this chapter, we will examine a dictionary class provided by .NET. We will then consider two ways of implementing dictionaries. Later chapters will examine improvements over these implementations.