On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Ramchandra Apte <maniandra...@gmail.com> wrote: > Not really. I remember a bug saying that only 256 hashes were required of > known texts and then the randomization becomes useless.
That requires that someone be able to get you to hash some text and give back the hash. In any case, even if you _are_ dealing with the worst-case hash collision attack, all it does is stop a Python dictionary from being an exception to the general principle. If you're doing a lookup in, say, a tree, then checking if the element exists and then retrieving it means walking the tree twice - O(log n) if the tree's perfectly balanced, though a splay tree would be potentially quite efficient at that particular case. But there's still extra cost to the check. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
