Raphaël Jakse wrote: > Is compressing for performance reasons? Hopefully. Because in the general case the distribution of the keys is unknown, no function used for computing the hash value can be guarenteed to indeed spread the hash values uniformly over the hash interval.
Compressing would have a negative effect on performance if more time for compressing and decrompessing would be needed than time was lost for resolving conflicting hash values. > is it more interesting to compress and then hash than just > hash ? The only purpose of compressing is to create the special case of close to no redundancy in the keys used for hashing. If this special case is already confirmed or it is known that no compression will deminish the computing time: just hash. -manfred