On Jan 17, 2005, at 5:16 PM, Beman Dawes wrote:
At 04:51 AM 1/17/2005, Matt Hurd wrote:
Perfect hashing and statistically reasonable hashing are quite different but practically the same ;-)
Isn't that stretching it a bit? Collision handling code can be eliminated if you know the hashing is perfect, for example. Although I do understand your point that for many practical applications, perfect hashing and statistically reasonable hashing would yield very similar performance.
Seems like both could have a place in Boost.
Statistically reasonable hashing of particular sets of strings has been a need that I've often run into.
To me perfect hashing has the big advantage that it vectorizes on vector supercomputer, in which case it is not at all comparable to statistically reasonable hashing which will always be dominated by worst-case performance on vector machines. Matthias