11.4.4 Address Hashing

The procedures described in this section may be used to make very efficient key-hashing procedures for arbitrary objects. All of these procedures are based on address hashing, which uses the address of an object as its hash number. The great advantage of address hashing is that converting an arbitrary object to a hash number is extremely fast and takes the same amount of time for any object.

The disadvantage of address hashing is that the garbage collector changes the addresses of most objects. The hash-table implementation compensates for this disadvantage by automatically rehashing tables that use address hashing when garbage collections occur. Thus, in order to use these procedures for key hashing, it is necessary to tell the hash-table implementation (by means of the rehash-after-gc? argument to the hash-table type constructors) that the hash numbers computed by your key-hashing procedure must be recomputed after a garbage collection.

procedure: eq-hash object

procedure: eqv-hash object

procedure: equal-hash object

These procedures return a hash number for object. The result is always a non-negative integer, and in the case of eq-hash, a non-negative fixnum. Two objects that are equivalent according to eq?, eqv?, or equal?, respectively, will produce the same hash number when passed as arguments to these procedures, provided that the garbage collector does not run during or between the two calls.

The following procedures are the hash functions specified by SRFI 69.

procedure: hash-by-identity key [modulus]

This procedure returns the same value as eq-hash, optionally limited by modulus.

procedure: hash-by-eqv key [modulus]

This procedure returns the same value as eqv-hash, optionally limited by modulus.

This procedure is not specified by SRFI 69.

procedure: hash-by-equal key [modulus]

This procedure returns the same value as equal-hash, optionally limited by modulus.

This procedure is called hash by SRFI 69, but that name was used for a different purpose by MIT/GNU Scheme long before SRFI 69 was written. The previous use of hash has been deprecated, but it will be some time until it can be removed.

The following procedures are the key-hashing procedures used by the standard address-hash-based hash tables. They are

procedure: eq-hash-mod object modulus

This procedure is the key-hashing procedure used by make-strong-eq-hash-table.

procedure: eqv-hash-mod object modulus

This procedure is the key-hashing procedure used by make-strong-eqv-hash-table.

procedure: equal-hash-mod object modulus

This procedure is the key-hashing procedure used by make-equal-hash-table.