In the interest of that Perl data types are better off being named
primarily after their meaning rather than their implementation,
probably the current worst offender is Hash.

Barring some better name, I highly recommend/propose renaming Hash to Dict.

The term Dict (as a short form of "dictionary") is well understood by
general people and is the term used for associative arrays in some
other languages, so it is easy to learn, and easy to explain to
people in Learning Perl.

The term Dict is easier for new people to Perl, either new
programmers or visitors from other languages, to learn than Hash is.
It allows more self-documenting code where one is used.  And writing
Learning Perl should be easier.

For Perl 5 people, it should be very easy to adapt, or for the most
part they may not notice any difference save for documentation
references.

You also have equal huffmanization since the terms Hash and Dict are
both of the same length, and they are also equally easy to type.

And aside from the 4 letter word, all the other details associated
with hashes, eg the % sigil and {} constructor, and parts named
keys,values,pairs,kv et al can/should remain the same as they are.

In fact, since many users of Perl don't refer to the data type by the
name Hash but rather just by % or {}, the change may not take from
their useability at all or they may not even notice that a change
occurred at all, so easy to adapt.

Of course, if that change is made, KeyHash should be renamed to
KeyDict, and so forth.

After this change, the term Hash is then freed up to be used more
specifically to describe an implementation detail of something and/or
hashing functions et al.

I think this change would be a good thing.

Feedback is appreciated, either pro or con.

snip

Dict also makes it sound like you are talking about pornography.  Of
course, hash makes it sound like you are talking about getting high.

snip

Please provide the peer-reviewed study that proves this as it goes
against my experience.

snip

The Perl 5 people are already annoyed that . is changing to ~, sigils
are becoming invariant, etc.  Why not change the name of one of the
data structures too?  If we give them too many things to complain
about they won't be able to decide where to start!

snip

They may be the same number of characters, but I can type hash without
leaving the home row on QWERTY keyboards, I don't know about Dvorak.

snip

Right, because dictionaries have keys and values not terms and
definitions.  Of course, it all makes sense now.

snip

Except of course those poor schmucks who foolishly wrote code like

<big snip>

I thought one of the things that Larry didn't want to do when moving
towards the next big version of Perl was to change the nature of the
language such that it wasn't Perl any more.

I feel that renaming a Hash to Dict would be one of those changes.

Personally, I don't find it difficult to discuss Perl hashes and a
computer science "hash algorithm" with people. One of the things I like
about Perl is that it doesn't presume that its coders are linguistically
impaired.

A Perl program's audience - imho - should be the programmers. That it
can run efficiently and well on a computer, again imho, is a side effect.

Nope.  Hash is mostly about meaning, and very little about implementation.
Please don't assume that I name things according to Standard Names in
Computer Science.  I name things in English.  Hash is just something
that is disordered, which describes the associative array interface
rather nicely, distinguishing it from the ordered Array interface.
The fact that it *might* be implemented using a hash algorithm is
merely a nice association with some mnemonic value for CSish folks.

Likewise, if I say Object I'm referring not to a CS object so much as
an English object, which is just something that is fairly discrete
and can be handled and treated as a single thing, even if it happens
to contain multiple things.  About the only nod to CS here is that
you can call the .HOW method on any Object.  Anything beyond that
is the fault of the metamodel.

In general I'm much more interested in the natural linguistic feel
of Perl than in matching up with any particular standard CS terms.
That's why you have "given" and "when", not "switch" and "case".
That's why you say "next" and "last", not "continue" and "break".
That's why we have "state" rather than "static", "my" rather than
"var" or "decl", "contend" rather than "atomic", "maybe" rather than
"orElse", "has" rather than "attr", "role" rather than "interface",
and so on.

Of course, it's possible to pick words that have too much overloading
in the CS literature, but I don't think either Hash or Object really
fall into that category, in the case of Hash because hash algorithms
are a fairly minor thing, and in the case of Object because people are
already used to all different kinds of Object systems, some class-based,
some prototype-based, so generalizing to a kind of object that gives
you both is not really a problem.

And as I said before, part of the reason for using Object is political,
because it means we're Really Doing Real OO™.

And maybe part of the reason for *not* using Universal is also
political, insofar as Perl 5's UNIVERSAL has been sorely abused in
various ways, and I don't want people to have that mental association.
(Kinda like the fact that Captures resemble anonymous typeglobs but
we're *not* going to call them that...)

I'm not a native english speaker, but I've never heard or read the word
"hash" outside CS.

I guess this ones are close:
- collection (contra: doesn't imply the access to an item)
- dictionary (contra: might be assumed ordered)
- directory (contra: might be assumed ordered, clashes with a file
directory)
- index (contra: might be assumed ordered, might be too technical)

The problem with the implication of an order in the real world concepts
is that you probably won't find one that isn't ordered.
Those things allow us to find something easily by a word. But as we
first have to find that word, we have an ordered list of the words...

So there is no perfect candidate in the above list.
But in my opinion they are still more "english" than "hash".
Additionally I believe it would be easier to learn that it's (e.g.) a
dictionary that just is not ordered than learning a whole new word like
a "hash" (which it was for me as a non-native english speaker).

It's a bit of a working-class dish, for using up your leftovers, so not
the sort of thing you'd eat as a tourist, but it seems many other
countries have the same sort of thing: using your leftovers is a pretty
universal need.

In colloquial English there's also the expression, "to make a hash of
something," which means to make a mess of it, to screw up.

That said, the dish and the idiom are both dying out, and the current
generation of school leavers might not have heard of either. I didn't
make the connection until Larry described it as being "disordered".

As a general point, I think it's pretty easy to make a mental
distinction between a 5ish hash and a hashtable, just as it's easy to
remember that 5's abstracted lists and arrays aren't the same concepts
as linked lists and C-style concrete arrays.

At least nobody can say that Perl is bad taste!