I was in a job interview the other day and someone asked me the following question, which I got wrong. Its not hard to remember, but I figure if I pass it on, and anyone out there who reads this blog for technical content might get a little refresher.The question was something like: write the declaration for an array of function pointers that take an integer and return a double in C. ...
In a recent article at Coding Horror, the author discusses Hash Tables. This is a very strong post on hash tables and their hashing function. It is definitely worth the read, but there is one thing I want to comment on. In the post Jeff Atwood discusses hash tables and states the following: Key-value pairs are quite common in real world data, and hashtables are both reasonably efficient in storage and quite fast at lookups, offering O(1) performance in most cases. That’s why hashtables are the go-to data structure for many programmers. It may not be the optimal choice, but unlike so many things in computer science, it’s rarely a bad choice. ...