The thing about boilerplate is that you were always rewriting it, so avoiding the footguns became habit. (So ... which takes longer, writing the data structure

The thing about boilerplate is that you were always rewriting it, so avoiding the footguns became habit. (So ... which takes longer, writing the data structure you want, as we all did then, or searching for the perfect library, as some people do now?) EDIT: awk(1) had built-in hash tables, and dates from 1977. Note that generic hashing becomes much more useful after D-space gets larger than 16-64k! (14-16 bits of address)