On Sun, 25 Jul 2010 at 07:11PM -0700, Carl Witty wrote:
> Hmm... looks like the current state of affairs is a mess.  Looking
> through the 'def __hash__' grep hits in sage/rings, there are quite a
> few of each of the following:
>
> 1) no doctest at all
> 2) provide both 32-bit and 64-bit doctests
> 3) define your hash function to produce a 32-bit output that's the
> same on 32-bit and 64-bit systems; doctest an instance of that output
> 4) doctest hash value equality without ever showing a doctest output
>
> plus one instance where the hash output is marked "# random".
>
> So whatever you do with this particular patch, it won't make things
> much worse :)

Yeah! That's what I like to hear. :)

> As for the desired state of affairs: I have a slight preference for
> providing both 32-bit and 64-bit doctest outputs, because it increases
> our chance of noticing if something changes unexpectedly. But I could
> also make a good case for only testing hash equality, because it
> slightly reduces the effort involved in changing hash functions,
> internal representations, etc. :)

If the hash values are supposed to be 32- or 64-bit integers, perhaps
testing that would be useful; something like

    sage: hash(foo) > 0 and is_integer(hash(foo))
    True
    sage: hash(foo) < 2^sys_bits()
    True

where sys_bits() is a function that we could add that returns "32" or
"64", depending on your system. (Maybe such a function is already in
Sage.) Or we could just do two tests:

    sage: hash(foo) < 2^32   # 32-bit
    True

and so on. The above setup ignores the particular value and instead
insures that it has the necessary properties, which I think is what we
really want. Thoughts?

Dan

--
---  Dan Drake
-----  http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake
-------

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