Re: Fingerprinting code

[Jeffrey A Law <law at cygnus dot com>]

  In message <19991122073153J.mitchell@codesourcery.com>you write:
  > In private email, Jason Merrill requested that I contribute the
  > following code for use in GCC.  This code is a port of the Modula-3
  > fingerprinting algorithm to C.  The fingerprinting algorithm is a
  > provably good 64-bit hash function; the chance of two random strings
  > colliding is provably small.  It is useful for providing very good
  > hashes; if the fingerprints match you can be extremely confident that
  > the original strings matched.
  > 
  > Another nice property is that you can build a new hash given two
  > hashes.  So, for instance, you can easily use this code to fingerprint
  > a binary tree by fingerprinting the left and right subtrees, and then
  > calling fingerprint_combine.
  > 
  > This code is under a BSD-style copyright, at the request of someone
  > instrumental to its existence.  It may be freely used in any software,
  > GPL'd or not.
  > 
  > Since CodeSourcery has a blanket copyright assignment on file for
  > *all* GNU software projects, I think that's all Jason should need to
  > start using it.
You would have to take it up with RMS. GCC is GPL'd, the exceptions are its
library and some of its header files.  It's not at all clear if we can accept
any BSD style copyrighted code in gcc. 

jeff