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>I document a product that deals in a lot of what I would call "name-value
pairs"
>(or "name/value pairs"). Recently, some of our engineers added some new
>features and discussed the same entities in terms of "key-value pairs".
>
>A web search turned up over 9000 instances of "name-value pair" to over 8700
>"key-value pair" citations.
>
>I have seen "name/value" used in the W3 standards.
To a programmer, saying "key/value" pair suggests some sort of database
lookup, typically a hash table. The key is the input to the database, the
value is what the database returns. For example, in a database of zip
codes, the key might be a zip code, and the value might be the name of the
city.
"Name/value" means almost exactly the same thing, but doesn't have as
strong a connotation of a database lookup. So it's better to say
"name/value pair" if you're talking about, say, a text file with a format
like the .INI files in old versions of Windows. Also, a "key" isn't
necessarily a text string, though in most cases it is.
>--Guy K. Haas ghaas -at- selectica -dot- com or gkhaas -at- usa -dot- net
> Software Exegete in Silicon Valley
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