CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2007/wiki1 1 aman

HashMaps in Java vs hashes in Ruby

Maps in java or hashes in ruby is any unordered object which stores associations between keys and their corresponding values, in which both keys and the values are objects. The key is unique , however the values may not necessarily be unique. The key, is used to retrieve a value from the map at a later stage after having had stored the values.

Comparing HashMaps and Hashes

1. Both in Java and Ruby, data structures are treated as objects. Hence both HashMaps and Hashes are used to store and manipulate objects which can be instantiated using the new method.

  in Java using   : HashMap h = new HashMap; 
  in Ruby using   : h = hash.new

2.In Ruby there is no difference between primitive data types and objects.Hence any variable or object can be put directly into the hashes container and methods can be invoked on them. However in Java primitive objects needs to be type casted to an Object class in order to use in built methods on the created HashMaps.

3.Ruby has the same syntactic sugar for hashes as well as arrays which makes the implementing hashes as simple as implementing an array. In Java however, since HashMaps implement the Collections framework, objects have to be inserted using the method.

  in Java using   : h.put (New Integer(0234), "Peter Drake");
  in Ruby using   : h = {0234 => "Peter Drake"}

  

2)Ruby has the same syntactic sugar for hashes as well as arrays which makes the implementing hashes as simple as implementing an array. Eg : h=Hash.new{"First"=>A,"Second"=>b,"third"=>c}

While in Java since they implement the collections framework so elements have to be inserted using add or put methods.

     hm.put("Betty Matthews", new Integer(40));

3)Inbuilt iterator feature of ruby enables accessing items one at a time. However in java Hashmaps cannot implement the Iterator interface. To implement the iteration feature , a collection view of the map for example a Set needs to be used .

In Ruby

h.each_pair{|key,value| puts key,value, " "}

In Java

Iterator itr = hm.keySet().iterator();

h={"Tom Sanders" => 21,"Billy Johnson" => 29, "Dave Patterson" => 18,"Julia Myers" =>25,"Scott"=>29,"Betty"=>40} puts h.values.min

package datastructures; import java.util.*;

public class Hashmaps {

public static void main(String args[]){ HashMap hm = new HashMap();

hm.put("Tom Sanders", new Integer(32)); hm.put("Billy Johnson", new Integer(24)); hm.put("Dave Patterson", new Integer(46)); hm.put("Julia Myers", new Integer(25)); hm.put("Scott Stephenson", new Integer(29)); hm.put("Betty Matthews", new Integer(40));

int temp;

Iterator itr = hm.keySet().iterator();

temp = ((Integer)hm.get(itr.next())).intValue();

while (itr.hasNext()){ if (temp >((Integer)hm.get(itr.next())).intValue()){

temp = ((Integer)hm.get(itr.next())).intValue(); } } System.out.println(" Lowest value is "+ temp);

}

} In version 1.5 of Java ,the generic feature of Java has implemented building type safe collections.In Ruby as well arrays or hashes can be made type safe by modifying ruby classes directly.