Though the books always say that the hash is traversed in a "random" order, you should not take that to mean it is traversed in a TRULY RANDOM order. They just meant you should not write your program such that it will depend on any PARTICULAR order.

A hashtable implementation might decide to visit the values %foo in a key order which looks suspiciously artificial: 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.06, 0.11, 0.16, 0.21, etc. You are hoping that the hashtable implementation doesn't actually bear any relationship to the pseudo-random number generator. Well, as seen in a recent security bug-fix, hash functions CAN be tied to random functions. You might end up aligning the two functions and defeating any appearance of unpredictability.

This hashtable technique is interesting, but I wouldn't trust it to return things in a random order.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Answer: How can I print all the numbers from 1 to n in random order? by halley
in thread How can I print all the numbers from 1 to n in random order? by vroom

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