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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Conventions and "tricks" used in Forth
Message-ID: <1813.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 5 Oct 90 03:27:29 GMT
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 28


 Date: 09-27-90 (08:57)              Number: 3865 (Echo)
   To: IAN WATTERS                   Refer#: NONE
 From: JONAH THOMAS                    Read: NO
 Subj: HASHING THE DICTIONARY        Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE

 -> CH"thread" and searches backwards.  The hashing algorithm is very
 -> simple and could be easily implemented as a code word.  Anybody out
 -> there have any thoughts on this?

 -> Many Forths have hashed dictionaries.  The one I wrote for a CP/M
 -> machine used 16 threads too, but a much simpler hashing function

   I wondered about using a binary tree for the dictionary structure. You
 could do a string comparison to get each place in the tree.  With N
 words in the dictionary, you'd average log2 (N) misses before the hit.
 It would take double the space for the links, though, in a 16 bit Forth
 that would be 4N bytes instead of 2N bytes.
   It looked like it would be really fast, but I never actually tried it,
 my projects aren't big enough to worry about compile time, and if it
 starts looking like a problem I save a version of the system with the
 modules that are debugged already included.
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