The comment following used to say:
/* We use ~hash instead of hash, as degenerate hash functions, such
as for ints <sigh>, can have lots of leading zeros. It's not
really a performance risk, but better safe than sorry.
12-Dec-00 tim: so ~hash produces lots of leading ones instead --
what's the gain? */
That is, there was never a good reason for doing it. And to the contrary,
as explained on Python-Dev last December, it tended to make the *sum*
(i + incr) & mask (which is the first table index examined in case of
collison) the same "too often" across distinct hashes.
Changing to the simpler "i = hash & mask" reduced the number of string-dict
collisions (== # number of times we go around the lookup for-loop) from about
6 million to 5 million during a full run of the test suite (these are
approximate because the test suite does some random stuff from run to run).
The number of collisions in non-string dicts also decreased, but not as
dramatically.
Note that this may, for a given dict, change the order (wrt previous
releases) of entries exposed by .keys(), .values() and .items(). A number
of std tests suffered bogus failures as a result. For dicts keyed by
small ints, or (less so) by characters, the order is much more likely to be
in increasing order of key now; e.g.,
>>> d = {}
>>> for i in range(10):
... d[i] = i
...
>>> d
{0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 2, 3: 3, 4: 4, 5: 5, 6: 6, 7: 7, 8: 8, 9: 9}
>>>
Unfortunately. people may latch on to that in small examples and draw a
bogus conclusion.
test_support.py
Moved test_extcall's sortdict() into test_support, made it stronger,
and imported sortdict into other std tests that needed it.
test_unicode.py
Excluced cp875 from the "roundtrip over range(128)" test, because
cp875 doesn't have a well-defined inverse for unicode("?", "cp875").
See Python-Dev for excruciating details.
Cookie.py
Chaged various output functions to sort dicts before building
strings from them.
test_extcall
Fiddled the expected-result file. This remains sensitive to native
dict ordering, because, e.g., if there are multiple errors in a
keyword-arg dict (and test_extcall sets up many cases like that), the
specific error Python complains about first depends on native dict
ordering.
and replaces them with a new API verify(). As a result the regression
suite will also perform its tests in optimization mode.
Written by Marc-Andre Lemburg. Copyright assigned to Guido van Rossum.
[NOTE: testall.py and autotest.py might could go away soon, I've
played with Guido's new regrtest.py script and it seems to work well.
I'll wait until Guido gives the word to completely switch over -- and
change the Makefile too!]
Tim Peters
Fredrik Lundh
Marc-André Lemburg
Guido van Rossum
Fred Drake
Barry Warsaw