Re: Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard

From: Andrew Swallow (am.swallow_at_btopenworld.com)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 20:59:49 +0000 (UTC)

Randy Howard wrote:

> In article <XLudnYz7ocXEtb_fRVn-2Q@comcast.com>, tlj3@comcast.net
> says...
>
>>Strange, I assumed it was a prime. Think such a key manifest constant
>>might deserve an explanatry comment? How about the whole routine? Why
>>should we be guessing?
>>
>>The bit about "comments omitted in the interest of publishing economy"
>>does not work for code distributed to students and intended as model
>>code. Fail the instructor.
>
>
> Actually the number was included in the original assignment, and
> it was not prime. It was also not a power of 2, but evenly divisible
> by 5.
>
Hash coded tables work better when their length is a prime number and
they do not exceed half full. Fortunately there are lots of prime numbers.

Andrew Swallow