Hi, I am not a Java specialist, but I assume its collections are quite similar to the ones in .NET (they would be identical if you were refering to J# instead of Java). In .NET a hashtable holds a lot of key,value pairs; it applies a lot of tricks to handle large collections very fast (that is given a key, find the value). It does not store things in alphabetical order. It does include all necessary logic to avoid collisions (thats different keys producing the same hash; trying to enter two key,value pairs with same key results in an exception). If you want to traverse a collection alphabetically, you must have an ordered collection, that either sorts by itself (as in SortedList) or that supports an explicit Sort operation (as in ArrayList, and List). So one often ends up having two parallel collections, say a Hashtable for fast key->value translation, and a SortedList for listing the keys alphabetically. Hope this helps. :)
Luc Pattyn
try { [Search CP Articles] [Search CP Forums] [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles] } catch { [Google] }
