The
Dictionary
class is the abstract parent of any class, such as
Hashtable
, which maps keys to values. Every key and every value is an object. In any one
Dictionary object, every key is associated with at most one value. Given a
Dictionary and a key, the associated element can be looked up. Any non-
null
object can be used as a key and as a value.
As a rule, the equals
method should be used by implementations of this class to decide if two keys are the same.
NOTE: This class is obsolete. New implementations should implement the Map interface, rather than extending this class.
@author unascribed
@version 1.24, 11/17/05
@see java.util.Map
@see java.lang.Object#equals(java.lang.Object)
@see java.lang.Object#hashCode()
@see java.util.Hashtable
@since JDK1.0