A detail of the hash protocol

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 4:20 AM, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote:
> In this page:
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/arrays.html#associative
> regarding the hashing protocol it says that structs need:
> uint toHash();
> While classes:
> hash_t toHash()
>
> Is that a little documentation error? I presume they both have to return an uint or hash_t or a size_t...
>
> What's the purpose of a separated hash_t type? Can't it be removed, keeping just an uint or size_t for that purpose?
>
> Thank you, bye,
> bearophile
>

I'm pretty sure it's actually a limitation of DDoc.  DDoc always
outputs the base type of an alias instead of the alias name, which
really, _really_ pisses me off.  Coincidentally, hash_t is defined as
"alias uint hash_t;", I presume for the potential of having i.e. a
64-bit hash at some point.