As one might expect, it's deeply involved in hash tables, yes! There's more than one way to map one set of data to another. Change of base is certainly one that has some nice properties like speed and reproducibility. But a hash function (at least any good one) has the advantage that it doesn't care about the length of the input, whereas a change of base is actually going to want it to be quite short (until you mix in other tricks like doing a modulus over MAX_INT, but that's getting dangerously close to a (bad) hash function!). Also, two similar inputs should (again assuming a good hash function) produce very different results.Slymodi wrote:to my knowledge that is just mapping data, sort of like an array, but people like it better, I think just converting it to a certain base is better
I won't speak to what people like better. There's a turf war going on at work between the windows guys and the linux guys, so I get quite enough of that type of conversation.