Programming Challenge Eight Closing and Nine Starts Tomorrow

We've a couple of entries to mark so I'll have those done over the weekend. As I won't be marking until then, I'll allow late entries until Sunday morning.

With the new month comes a new challenge and this one is to see how imaginatively you can store 50,000 English words with an associated value. The values are random, provided in a text file with one value for each word. The harder bit is then to retrieve 10,000 of these values as fast as possible. You are given a list of 10,000 words, fetch the associated values and sum them up and output the total along with how long it took. Easy? Well yes, but to make it that bit more challenging, you cannot use any 3rd party libraries and that includes Boost/STL or .NET containers. Have fun! You've 29 days and counting...

• Link to Programming Challenge Nine. Manage a Data Structure
• Link to Programming Challenge Eight. Score Poker Hands.