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From: Daniel James (daniel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-03-09 08:31:08


Peter Dimov wrote:

> It is a deliberate design decision that the algorithms are fully
> specified. The goal is precisely to not allow you (as an implementor) to
> change them.. ;-)
>
> As usual, this is a tradeoff between giving more freedom to implementors
> to improve the behavior and giving more portability guarantees to users.
> Varying the hash function can lead to dramatic changes in performance
> and not specifying the exact algorithm will mean that an application
> using the default hash functions would need to be benchmarked again
> after every change of the standard library.

Yes, I agree for the final standard, but we're not there yet.

I'm also a little worried about how the hash functions will vary with
different platforms. For example, if sizeof(long) > sizeof(std::size_t),
then hash_value(long) might be weak for values which only vary in the
higher bits.

But I do want to stay close to your design for now. It's far better than
what I would have come up with and it'll be good to get more experience
of how well it works before considering any changes.

> Of course the fact that hash_range gives the same result as hash_value
> on the corresponding container is no accident, either.

Yes, the reason that this came up, is because this wasn't true for
Jeremy's original implementation. But I think his hash function for
strings was faster, which might be desirable.

Daniel


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