Hashing

HashTable has these tunable parameters:

• Capacity (usually a prime number), initialCapacity; if this is not set large enough, collisions will result, causing hashing to stop and linear list processing to be executed afterwards.

• Load factor (0.0-1.0), loadFactor, which is a percentage of capacity beyond which the table will expand. HashTable calls hashCode(). These classes have pre-defined hashCode() methods:

• Color, Font, Point

• File

• Boolean, Byte, Character, Double, Float, Integer, Long, Short, String

• URL

• BitSet, Date, GregorianCalendar, Locale, SimpleTimeZone. Note that String.hashCode() does not always sample all the characters, depending on the length:

• Length from 1 to 15: all n Length from 16 to 23: every other character

• Length from 24 to 31: every third character

• And so on.