OK, Sorry I was under the impression you were showing parts of Perl's implementation ...

... and this raised some security doubts.

It also surprised me to see that the address to the key is hashed and not the string of the key.

Cause this has some implications.

• For example these pointers must stay "stable" after memory re-allocations and I have seen Perl ports to machines without MMU listed (like running on Motorola 68000 boxes).
• It's also that you can normally replace the string behind the pointer with a shorter one, which would make keys mutable (in a limited way).

Anyway ...

Thanks for the enlightening conversation! :)

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