[nitrogen]

In 1997, before for-each and generics, it would've been very verbose. I learned Java in 2006 and haven't written much in a while, so I maybe slightly off, but I think you'd either get an Iterator for the Hashtable's keys and repeatedly call Iterator.next() and Hashtable.get(), or get the length of Hashtable.keys() and use a traditional C-style for loop.

Okay, I couldn't resist looking up the old docs, so this looks about right (Enumeration instead of Iterator -- two interfaces that do basically the same thing):

  void printTable(Hashtable table)
  {
    Enumeration e = table.keys();
    while(e.hasMoreElements()) {
      String key = (String)e.nextElement();
      String value = (String)table.get(key);
      System.out.println(key + ": " + value);
    }
  }

[arethuza]

Yeah - that's pretty much it. Except that being lazy I'd have probably not bothered casting the keys and values to Strings and just called toString() on them directly....

[onemoreact]

Did you expect people to be able to do this by hand? I mean infront of an IDE I could do this in 5-10 minutes. But on a blackboard or pen and paper there is little chance I would get anywhere close to a correct answer.

[kragen]

I don't understand how that's possible. I mean, I'm going to assume that you're telling the truth, but I don't understand how it's possible for that knowledge to reside so entirely in your IDE rather than in your head. Do you mean you know that you would use an Enumeration, but not the names of the Enumeration and Hashtable methods that you would use? If you're trying to debug a piece of code and it's calling the wrong methods on an Enumeration or a Hashtable, how do you tell that they're the wrong methods? How does this work?

[onemoreact]

I have use a lot of diffrent programming languages. I have trouble seperating what you can in theory do with a hashmap from what a given implementaiton let's you do with a hashmap. I have also engraned typing code out to the point where a lot of basic syntax features quickly become automatic I might think EOL but I type ;<carriage return>

The best way I can discribe it is like singing. You can have trouble speaking the words to something that you can sing without difficulty.

[cousin_it]

I think onemoreact meant that after relying on a good IDE for awhile you can easily forget whether the method is named table.keys() or table.getKeys(), hasElements() or hasMoreElements(), stuff like that. Forgetting such things doesn't impair your ability to understand or debug the code.

[nitrogen]

Java's idiosyncratic interfaces don't always help either: there's Enumeration which has nextElement() and hasMoreElements(), and there's Iterator which has next() and hasNext().

[arethuza]

This was the last question out of 15 or so that we used to give to people as part of an interview if they claimed they had done Java before - it was a written test. Some people had only done C or C++ before and had only had a quick look at Java and still did pretty well in it.

[StavrosK]

I see, thanks. It's more complicated than the Python version, which does the iteration implicitly, but I'm still surprised that nobody was able to do it.

[phillytom]

FYI - there's a potential defect there - keys are not required to be strings so you should lookup the value before you cast.

[free]

Ideally, whatever your key/value is would have the toString method over ridden to meaningfully represent it. Alternatively, I could write it as

for(Map.Entry<K, V> entry : map.entrySet()){

     System.out.println(entry.getKey());

     System.out.println(entry.getValue());

}

[nitrogen]

I was relying on the assumption from the original question that the keys and values were all Strings: "...a Hashtable containing String keys and values and printing them all out."