HASHPUT and HASHGET

[JONL at MIT-MC (Jon L White)]

Unforuntately, MacLISP has never had the hash-table primitives
which Interlisp has had for over a decade.  This code could
still be written, and probably wholly in LISP itself.
  If we had a good HASHPUT scheme, there would, I think, be
little interest in forcing a particular interpretation onto
the GET (and ASSOC and etc) functions, ** based on how the
data are implemented in PDP10 MacLISP **.
  Why should random pair cells be the only ones onto which
you could put properties?  Why not ARRAY cells too?  one
could even have a uniform treatment for properties of numbers,
lists, pairs, arrays, hunks etc.
  The language feature should not depend, gratuitously, on
a particular data format.