May 31, 2003
6:28 p.m.
[Phillip J. Eby]
... or at least warning the developers of alternatives to CGI (e.g. Zope, Quixote, SkunkWeb, CherryPy, etc.) that alternate hashes might be a good idea.
Don't know about SkunkWeb or CherryPy etc, but Zope and Quixote apps can use ZODB's BTrees for mappings. Insertion and lookup in a BTree have worst-case log-time behavior, and no "bad" sets of keys exist for them. The Buckets forming the leaves of BTrees are vulnerable, though: provoking quadratic-time behavior in a Bucket only requires inserting keys in reverse-sorted order, and sometimes apps use Buckets directly when they should be using BTrees. Using a data structure appropriate for the job at hand is usually a good idea <wink>.