hashing

[Tom Novelli]

I need to use hashing for a bunch of things in Retro... the Forth dictionary
and other symbol tables, the distributed persistent store, storage
allocation...  I wrote a simple hashing routine, using modulus as the hash
function.  I hear there's a better way using multiplication.. anyone know
what it is?  Let's create a little collection of hash fn's and test them out.

I've considered using various tree structures too (radix tries, etc.) but
that looks more complicated, and they're subject to balancing problems. 
We can do some cool things with hash functions... decentralized filesystems,
"unlimited" addressing schemes, public key ciphers (would someone in a free
country please write that part so we can export it? :), free-form networks..
the kinda things libertarians like :)

Any thoughts?

-- 
Tom Novelli <tcn@tunes.org>
http://bespin.tunes.org/~tcn