The HashTable is an abstract class that defines attributes and methods available to all its subclasses. It enables object references to be stored in a keyed table for later lookup by key. The HashTable class uses hashing algorithms to perform the work of storing and finding objects. It uses a fixed set of buckets. Each bucket contains an overflow chain of elements.

The Setup method specifies optional settings for the HashTable. It can be used once before using any of the other HashTable methods. If any other HashTable methods are invoked without using the Setup method before, the HashTable will be set up with default values. Although the methods belong to the HashTable class, they are detailed in IntegerHashTable Class (see IntegerHashTable Class) and StringHashTable Class (see StringHashTable Class), which actually implement the methods.