Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: >If you regard the object representation as an array of bytes, does it >take long realize it is not much different from hashing a character >string? > It takes less if your proposal comes together with a specific one for character string hashing: not, trivially, because in this way the problem would be solved completely ;) but because, given the plethora of different ways you can hash character strings, I'm not sure one considered "good" for real text would be also good for strings-from-floats, there are *lots* of subtle statistical issues involved. For example, I'm not at all sure that the hash function suggested by submitter of 21193 would also work statistically well for floats (note that most of the real world succesful applications mentioned in the linked web page are about *real* text). I don't think laws like the famous ETAOINSHRDLU distribution of the english letters apply also to the bytes of floats, do you? ;)
That said, I agree that reusing what we are going to have for strings also for floats is in any case better than the present placeholder, at the time certainly not considered by Matt the final production solution. Paolo.
