Eh?
I see a discussion about the speed of hash tables, and not once is the word "hashing" brought up. That seemed fishy to me. I suppose many know how to use hash tables, and are somewhat aware of how it works, but are clueless as to why they are fast for retrieval of data.
From your post I deduced you were from that category. Sure you know it is stored in RAM, but as I stated in my previous post, so are hidden windows, and they are still slower than hash tables.
Point of my post was to clarify some things about why exactly hash tables are fast. Being stored in RAM is, as mentioned, just one of the reasons.
The fact that hash tables use a non-lineair search approach is atleast as important as the fact that they are stored in ram.
