well, i'll see what gets said when we do probing sometime this week.
as to the underlying algorithm for each bucket: If you set it up (as this one should normally be but not necessarily--e.g., if user made a HashTable with size 20, then proceeded to put thousands of items in it) to have a fairly low average depth in each bucket, would it be worth the overhead to make each bucket into some kind of sorted object or is it generally better just to use fast insertion without worrying about the internal retrieval time inside each bucket.
i just made each bucket a list (a bucket list, so i see!!), but you then have to walk through the list until you encounter the end or your key, whereas a sorted object would improved searching within the bucket at the expense of adding overhead to insertion.
