Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1554

I think you missed some of the bigger fish, as other responses should have made clear.

It was an buttignment to learn about hashing, which is used in performance critical code quite often. This code was given to them to use in their implementation of a larger buttignment. Who would expect a PhD to give them code to use that people could find so many faults with (for only 4 lines of code, not counting the blank line)?

It's to find an index into an array, I.e. a "hash table", (there are lots of methods, but the most common is probably "hash chaining" where each "bucket" of the array is a list, with hash collisions (strings hashing to the same bucket (hashvalue) chained from there. One of the primary goals is to avoid collisions as much as possible, and also to attempt to make sure that there is a reasonably even distribution of collisions across the buckets. I.e., they don't all hash to offset 0, 5, 10, 15 and leave the other TBLSIZE-4 buckets empty, resulting in 4 very long lists to fall down on lookups.

There are tons of variations, which I won't try to cover here, but GIYF.

-- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)