order independent hash?

[88888 Dihedral]

On Monday, December 5, 2011 4:13:01 AM UTC+8, Ian wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 11:06 AM, 88888 Dihedral
> <dihedr... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >> If you want to talk about ways to use dicts, please start a different
> >> thread for it.  As has been pointed out several times now, it is
> >> off-topic for this thread, which is about hash *functions*.
> >
> > A hash that can hash objects is not a hash function at all.
> 
> Please explain what you think a hash function is, then.  Per
> Wikipedia, "A hash function is any algorithm or subroutine that maps
> large data sets to smaller data sets, called keys."
> 
> > Are you miss-leading the power of true OOP ?
> 
> I have no idea what you are suggesting.  I was not talking about OOP at all.

In python the (k,v) pair in a dictionary k and v can be  both an objects. 
v can be a tuple or a list.  There are some restrictions on k to be an
 hashable type in python's implementation. The key is used to compute the position of the pair to be stored in a  hash table. The hash function maps key k to the position in the hash table. If k1!=k2 are both  mapped to the same
position, then something has to be done to resolve this.