> That's exactly what I'm asking... How many places are there where we > explicitly depend on the fact that the address can be used to define > uniqueness?
All places where strings are compared. Say, a few thousand places in the code, probably? Most importantly: Mappings and multiset, identifiers in objects and programs, switch and string comparison functions. Especially things like object and program identifiers, switch mappings and multisets would be dead slow without this optimization. And hashing a string takes basically no time at all. Have you measured it to take a lot of CPU somewhere? -- Per Hedbor
