Tie::SubstrHash(3pm)					 Perl Programmers Reference Guide				      Tie::SubstrHash(3pm)

NAME

       Tie::SubstrHash - Fixed-table-size, fixed-key-length hashing

SYNOPSIS

	   require Tie::SubstrHash;

	   tie %myhash, 'Tie::SubstrHash', $key_len, $value_len, $table_size;

DESCRIPTION

       The Tie::SubstrHash package provides a hash-table-like interface to an array of determinate size, with constant key size and record size.

       Upon tying a new hash to this package, the developer must specify the size of the keys that will be used, the size of the value fields that
       the keys will index, and the size of the overall table (in terms of key-value pairs, not size in hard memory). These values will not change
       for the duration of the tied hash. The newly-allocated hash table may now have data stored and retrieved. Efforts to store more than $ta-
       ble_size elements will result in a fatal error, as will efforts to store a value not exactly $value_len characters in length, or reference
       through a key not exactly $key_len characters in length. While these constraints may seem excessive, the result is a hash table using much
       less internal memory than an equivalent freely-allocated hash table.

CAVEATS

       Because the current implementation uses the table and key sizes for the hashing algorithm, there is no means by which to dynamically change
       the value of any of the initialization parameters.

       The hash does not support exists().

perl v5.8.0							    2002-06-01						      Tie::SubstrHash(3pm)