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Why is that there is no Hashtable support as part of Standard C Library? Is there any specific reason for this?
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Hash Table is a data structure which stores data in an associative manner. In hash table, the data is stored in an array format where each data value has its own unique index value.
There are some operations which are not efficiently supported by hash tables, such as iterating over all the elements whose keys are within a certain range, finding the element with the largest key or smallest key, and so on.
A Hash Table in C/C++ (Associative array) is a data structure that maps keys to values. This uses a hash function to compute indexes for a key.
Uses: They are widely used in many kinds of computer software, particularly for associative arrays, database indexing, caches and sets.
C seems unusual by today's standards because there are no useful data structures defined. None. Not even strings — and if you think a C string is a data structure, well, we'll have to disagree on what a "data structure" is.
If you like C, then think of it as a "blank slate"... your entire application is made of code written by you and libraries you choose to pull in, plus a few fairly primitive standard library functions, with maybe one or two exceptions like qsort. People use C these days to implement things like Python, Ruby, Apache, or the Linux kernel. These are projects that use all of their own data structures anyway, and they wouldn't be likely to use something like the STL.
Many C libraries implement generic hash tables. There are tradeoffs, and you can pick your favorite. Some of them are configurable using callbacks.
With all of these libraries that do what you want, what's the point of adding a hash table to the C standard?
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