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-On [20010619 23:20], Ben Kovitz (ben-kovitz -at- vertel -dot- com) wrote:
>Guy Haas wrote:
>
>>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.
I have to add my support to Ben's answer.
It is more common to use key/value pair if you are referring to
something like a hashtable.
And in that context the key is often a part of the values put in an
array. (Or whatever attribute you choose to come to a reasonbly balanced
and weighted distribution of the values within the key `buckets'.)
Example:
Take the first two or three letters of first or last names, and then put
all values starting with these letters in a single array called by the
first letters.
Jer -> Jeremy, Jeroen, Jerome
Whereas Pet might contain Petrov, Peter
In effect this will speed up look-ups, since you try and make it
deterministic.
A name/value pair more commonly means, at least to me, a combination of
a configuration name with its value. Say a Windows registry name or a
Unix rc.conf entry.
Hope this helps,
--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven/Asmodai asmodai -at- [wxs -dot- nl|freebsd.org|xmach.org]
Documentation nutter/C-rated Coder, finger asmodai -at- ninth-circle -dot- dnsalias -dot- net http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/books/developers-handbook/
>From Nothing comes only Nothing...
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