[re: hashing identifiers]
>  I have had the same problem and I was about to write the
>  new function when I stopped: the time taken by the hash
>  function was not worth the extra coding.

Even if it takes more, or as much, time as comparing identifiers directly,
there is still an advantage to interning strings: you can share their
representations. Of course, if you don't expect much sharing, or you don't
expect to allocate many identifiers during any single run, it may still not
be worht it.

--fac