On Aug 30, 2007, at 5:08 AM, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
Hello Jan-Willem,
you may be interested to read hashing papers mentioned at http://www.encode.ru/forums/index.php?action=vthread&forum=1&topic=413
Not only did I read them, I tried out the Bob Jenkins hash function! My conclusion is that for Data.HashTable we do not generally need a strong hash; we need a reasonable hash that's cheap to evaluate. The mulHi operation is cheap on most architectures (eg a single multiply on 32-bit x86). Remember, for a hash table we're trading off hashing cost with the cost of chain traversal. There are plenty of other applications of hashing where we need to do a better job than this. -Jan
-- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com