Surely this is an older technique? When I took data structures in college I implemented deletions that way, because I wasn't smart enough to invent tombstones.

Surely this is an older technique? When I took data structures in college I implemented deletions that way, because I wasn't smart enough to invent tombstones. Looking through the wikipedia history, the sketch of it wasn't added yet. I had wanted to use "better" techniques like quadratic probing, but I couldn't figure out how to perform deletions, so I fell back on linear probing.