On Sep 10, 10:49 am, Rick DeNatale <rick.denat...@[...].com>  wrote:
>  On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Shot (Piotr Szotkowski)<s...@[...].pl> wrote:
>  > Hello, ruby-talk.
> 
>  > What’s the best (fast, yet with relatively few cases when equal hashes
>  > are generated for non-eql objects) way to implement a hash method?
> 
>  > Is XOR-ing the hashes of an object’s instance variables (assuming that
>  > two objects are eql if their ivars are eql) a good general approach?
> 
>  > I’m asking because I use this pattern in my code, and it seems quite
>  > fast; I needed to work around a bug in MRI’s Set#hash and this solution¹
>  > seems about as fast as the original MRI’s Set#hash. I’m just not sure
>  > whether it’s hashy enough (so to speak) in that two un-eql objects
>  > hashed in this way produce different hashes often enough.
> 
>  Well, let's look at how Array#hash works here's the 1.8 C code:
> 
>  static VALUE
>  rb_ary_hash(ary)
>      VALUE ary;
>  {
>      long i, h;
>      VALUE n;
> 
>      h = RARRAY(ary)->len;
>      for (i=0; i<RARRAY(ary)->len; i++) {
>          h = (h << 1) | (h<0 ? 1 : 0);
>          n = rb_hash(RARRAY(ary)->ptr[i]);
>          h ^= NUM2LONG(n);
>      }
>      return LONG2FIX(h);
> 
>  }
> 
>  This looks like a typical cryptographic hash algorithm pattern
>  combining bit rotation and xor.  It seeds the value with the length of
>  the array, then for each element, rotates the value 1 bit to the left,
>  then xors in the elements hash.
> 
>  This scrambles the bits more than just a straight xor
> 
>  --
>  Rick DeNatale

I must take STRONG exception to your characterization of this
algorithm.  This method performs parallel xors of the data. Change one
bit of one of the values, and you change one bit of the hash.  A
fundamental property of cryptographic hashes is that changing one bit
of the input changes many bits of output.  This is even true of crcs.
Cryptographic hashes do rotate & xor (sometimes), but only as part of
a larger operation.