Hash??? Not quite clear on what this is...

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1990Nov22.235522.26487 at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> gordon at osiris.cso.uiuc.edu (John Gordon) writes:
>So, if you are looking for the word "I", you would apply the hash function
>and come up with 1, and you would look in array element 1, and there it is!

Or, some other datum that hashes to the same bucket is there.  While
so-called "perfect hashing" doesn't have that problem, in practice
perfect hashing is rarely possible (normally only for language keywords
in a compiler); instead, support must be provided to resolve hash
collisions.  Simple-minded collision resolution schemes can perform
extremely poorly...