I wrote:
More interesting are Maybe, Either, lists, tuples, Data.Map, Data.Set, etc. These are far from trivial; I did some work on it for Python. If you think you can just do something fairly simple and reasonable and hope that it will have the right statistical properties, I promise you that it won't work.
Thomas Schilling wrote:
Are you referring to the hash function or to the fact that you want structurally different types to map to different hashes?
The former. In Python, where objects of varying types will be inserted into the same hash table, the latter is also important. But why should we care about that in Haskell? If people circumvent the type system by serializing before hashing, I don't think we can help them very much. Or perhaps I am misunderstanding you. Thanks, Yitz