On Mon, Nov 01, 1999 at 01:32:06AM +0100, Hrvoje Niksic wrote: It avoids special cases in the enumeration/dump/reload code. What is actually dumped right now is the whole hentry array, which is a bunch of key/values pairs. Only slighly less compact because some are empty, the hash table being of course slightly bigger than the number of values it contains. So this avoids special-casing at a low cost. Healthier, I don't know. Faster, I'm not sure the difference is huge (the only different lies in the presence of empty hentries with what a specialized code would do vs. reorganize_hash_table()). If you want to try doing that, I'll give you a hint: Create a new description type (it's simply an enum in lrecord.h), use it for the hentry pointer description in hash_table_description (instead of the XD_STRUCT_PTR), and implement your packed dumping in the switchs. Sincerely, I don't think the difference will be significant. OG.