<character> "#", ASCII character 35. Common names: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch; hex; INTERCAL: mesh. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; ITU-T: square, pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat. The pronunciation of "#" as "pound" is common in the US but a bad idea; Commonwealth Hackish has its own, rather more apposite use of "pound sign" (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace "#"; thus Britishers sometimes call "#" on a US-ASCII keyboard "pound", compounding the American error). The US usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a "#" suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced "hash" outside the US. The name "octothorpe" was made up by a Bell Labs supervisor, Don Macpherson. {Octothorpe story (http://sigtel.com/tel_tech_octothorpe.html)}. (2003-07-05)

hash coding

<character> hash.

hash character

<algorithm> (Or "message digest function") A {one-way function} which takes a variable-length message and produces a fixed-length hash. Given the hash it is computationally infeasible to find a message with that hash; in fact one can't determine any usable information about a message with that hash, not even a single bit. For some one-way hash functions it's also computationally impossible to determine two messages which produce the same hash. A one-way hash function can be private or public, just like an encryption function. MD5, SHA and Snefru are examples of public one-way hash functions. A public one-way hash function can be used to speed up a public-key digital signature system. Rather than sign a long message, which can take a long time, compute the one-way hash of the message, and sign the hash. {sci.crypt FAQ (ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/usenet-by-group/sci.crypt/)}. (2001-05-10)

In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every "leaf" (node) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node that is not a leaf (called a branch, inner node, or inode) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. A hash tree allows efficient and secure verification of the contents of a large data structure.

<algorithm, cryptography> (SHA) A one-way hash function developped by NIST and defined in standard FIPS 180. SHA-1 is a revision published in 1994; it is also described in ANSI standard X9.30 (part 2). (2003-04-12)

The Secure Hash Algorithms are a family of cryptographic hash functions published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a U.S.

In fiction, a character is a person or other being in a narrative (such as a novel, play, radio or television series, music, film, or video game).Baldick (2001, 37) and Childs and Fowler (2006, 23).