>>56
That like claiming C++ is the fastest language.
No actually, it's not. C++ does not win the speed game in any problem domain. Anything it is reasonably good at C does better. The same can't be said for a hashtable, which has constant time insertion, lookup, and deletion. You won't find such behavior in any other data structure. I'm not sure what you are trying to say regarding indexing vs pointer arithmetic, but if you are arguing that either one of them is faster, you are wrong.