>All of this talk about hashing, again. :) A while ago a posted what I
>thought was a nice solution to this whole problem. I got no response on
>it, so I was never sure whether it was deemed a good thing, a weird
>thing (green plane idea), or a bad thing.

Hi, Travis:  I remember your original post -- I saved it away and went 
back to it when the hashing stuff came up again.  I agree with it; I 
don't know why the hashing stuff (an implementation detail of Set keys) 
has become so ingrained in the image such that every object must always 
have a hash value.  I like the idea of computing and attaching a hash 
value to an object only when it is required, and like your idea of 
pushing the hash computation out to the application itself.



     -- tim