From: nowhere@never.at   
      
    Kerr-Mudd,John wrote:   
   ...   
   > Yes, thanks. Keyword noted!   
   :)   
      
   >> I could never see where there the gain of "hashing" actually is.   
   >> Fast_Find can be achieved with SORT and/or INDEX-tables, shorten   
   >> a list by compression (ie: to 6 bit ASCII) might help too.   
      
   > It was to have a smaller text part, and avoid the chaining that   
   > FORTH uses for it's keyword search. But Terje has shown that I was   
   > over-optimistic to naively think I could have about half of 64k   
   > unique words. I suppose, if I'm resigned to 32bits for a hash, I   
   > could instead use the MS shortfilename approach of "SPAC" "SPA~1"   
   > etc as shortened versions of SPACE and SPACES, but I'm going off   
   > the whole thing now.   
      
   ASCII-quads are a good choice, also within (66's) 16-bit code.   
   But "spaceship" and "spaceshit" would collide twice,   
   kinda a mess in space then :)   
      
   If your 350 words fit into 64K then what would be wrong by having   
   their unique 16-bit ID as an address offset into a list segment ?   
      
   what I use for keywords/errormsg/helptxt/.. :   
   all lists are sorted and every entry is preceded by two bytes.   
   the first byte hold the string size (00=> max=256).   
   the second byte contain my text-type and decoration flags.   
      
   So a search can easy walk through even the entries show different   
   length and type.   
   I also have a tag-list that contain all the offsets of my strings,   
   and I can use an ordinal (error#, help-ID,..) for print or display.   
   __   
   wolfgang   
      
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