Question

Regarding the HashTable (and subsequent derivatives of such) does anyone know what hashing algorithm .net and Java utilise?

Are List and Dictionary both direct descandents of Hashtable?

Answer 1

The hash function is not built into the hash table; the hash table invokes a method on the key object to compute the hash. So, the hash function varies depending on the type of key object.

In Java, a List is not a hash table (that is, it doesn’t extend the Map interface). One could implement a List with a hash table internally (a sparse list, where the list index is the key into the hash table), but such an implementation is not part of the standard Java library.