Content deleted Content added
Line 197:
The whole article reads like a popular magazine article.
Watch the technical language: the text says, ''The Rabin fingerprint is a popular and effective rolling hash function.'' No, it isn't a rolling hash function, it's just a hash function, a fingerprinting hash function, to be precise. The term 'rolling hash function' is imprecise diction in any case: rolling hashing is an algorithm that uses a hash function to produce successive hash codes over fixed- length portions of a string. Such a hash code might be called a 'rolling hash'. Furthermore, a Rabin fingerprint isn't confined to rolling hashes - it can be used anywhere a hash function is used.
For example, ''A brute-force substring search algorithm checks all possible positions: [pseudocode omitted] This algorithm works well in many practical cases,''. We do this in Computer Science 101, when we're learning about nested loops. About the best we can say about this algorithm is that it will find the substring(s). String search is a critical software function, and doing it well requires a scholarly approach. Brute force is hardly ever a good solution in the software world.
| |||