smalltalk> the abc.db is always 312k though i have use clear(), how can smalltalk> i shrink the space?
You really can't without deleting the file. Hash file implementations trade off file size against improve key lookup performance. Similar tradeoffs are made in the implementation of Python's dictionary and other languages' associative arrays. My Google skills must be lacking this morning. Here's the best I've been able to come up with in the way of explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array#Efficient_representations Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list