Re: symbols hash table

[Martin Grabmueller]

> From: Dirk Herrmann <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 18:09:12 +0100 (MET)
> 
[snip]

> I have thought about such a representation, but I think that it is
> probably not the best solution for our case:  The hash table for symbols
> should be a weak hash table.  That means, that entries from that table may
> disappear.  In other words, when looking for a symbol in the hash table,
> the fact that you stumble across an empty slot does not mean that you can
> finish your search:  The symbol you are looking for may have been added to
> the hash table when the slot was in use.
> 
> Thus, when looking for a symbol you will always have to search a
> predefined number of slots before you can be sure that a symbol is not
> contained in the table.  Alternatively, the code that removes unreferenced
> symbols from the table during gc will have to do some clever rehashing.
> However, this will complicate things a lot since you must handle the case
> that the hash table was in the process of being resized just when the gc
> was issued.

Have you thought about storing a special value into the table when
deleting symbols, so that an insertion operation will use a freed slot
(with that special value) for entering a new symbol, but a search will
deal with that slot as if it was in use?  That would be a solution to
the problem you mentioned above.

Regards,
  'Martin

-- 
Martin Grabmueller              address@hidden
http://www.pintus.de/mgrabmue/  address@hidden on EFnet