Previously I said:

At 07:15 AM 4/28/2000 -0500, Jerry Fochtman wrote:
 >IMAGE uses the 'right most' 32 bits if the size of the binary key field is
 >4 bytes or greater.  If the key field is 2 bytes, these bytes are placed in
 >the right 2 bytes of the calculation field and the left 2 bytes set to zero.
 >The reason whole numbers in real type key items greater than 4 bytes in size
 >(eg. E4, R4 or larger) generates lots of secondaries is because the mantisa
 >portion of the field (right most bytes) tends to be a consistent (zero) and
 >when used in the modulo calculation, derives the same address value.

Sorry, but I had overlooked that its not simply real values > 4 bytes, but
essentially all real values that can cause this type of problem.  This is
because the use of the exponential technique to represent the value in powers
of 2 does not lend itself to the possibility of deriving an even distribution
over the area represented by the capacity. (Gosh its been a long time since
I've dealt with number theory, statistical theory, etc...!)



/jf
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                          Thursday, April 20th

            Today in 1949 - Cortisone was discovered.

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