In-Reply-To: <d0pe8q$tdi$1@sea.gmane.org> daniel@calamity.org.uk (Daniel James) wrote (abridged):

But it will be easy to make mistakes for more complicated (possibly recursive) types. Especially since hash_combine is not associative or transitive. I could see that leading to mistakes.

I can see that it's possible to call the function with the wrong arguments, but that kind of problem can be addressed with documentation and/or by careful naming. I don't think that's worth distorting the interface and introducing side effects and spurious variables and inefficiency to fix it.

And it would be quite easy to forget to call hash_value (because many types are implicitly convertible to std::size_t)

Since that conversion is all hash_value does, why does it matter? That said, I agree the second argument should not be hash value. If we care about the first argument, perhaps the problem could be identified with an overload or specialisation. template < typename T, typename S> size_t hash_combine( S seed, const T &v ) { BOOST_STATIC_ASSERT( false ); } template <typename T, typename S> size_t hash_combine<>( size_t seed, const T &v ) { const size_t c = 0x12345678; // Or some other value. return seed ^ (hash_value(v) + c + (seed<<6) + (seed>>2)); } (I'm not so hot on templates so the above may be wrong, but I hope it conveys the idea.)

size_t my_hash_function(int x[4]) { using namespace boost;

return hash_combine( hash_combine(hash_value(x[0]), hash_value(x[1])), hash_combine(hash_value(x[2]), hash_value(x[3]))); }

I agree this is wrong. I think: return hash_combine( hash_combine( hash_combine( hash_value( x[0] ), x[1] ), x[2] ), x[3] ); is reasonable and ideally would be supported.

An alternative would be to implement hash_combine as an object. Something like:

struct hash_seed { hash_seed(); template <class T> void combine(T const&); std::size_t value() const; };

Then it could initialise itself to whatever it wants.

Do you mean the seed should be an object? I can see advantages to that, although it seems like overkill. Adding an optional seed argument to hash_range and/or hash_combine sounds like a good idea, though. -- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK