A hash in Unison is a 512-bit SHA3 digest of a term or a type's internal structure, excluding all names. The textual representation of a hash is its base32Hex Unicode encoding.
Unison attributes a hash to every term and type declaration, and the hash may be used to unambiguously refer to that term or type in all contexts. As far as Unison is concerned, the hash of a term or type is its true name.
Literal Hash References
A term, type, data constructor, or ability constructor may be unambiguously referenced by hash. Literal hash references have the following structure:
- A term definition has a hash of the form
#xwherexis the base32Hex encoding of the hash of the term. For example#a0v829. - A term or type definition that’s part of a cycle of mutually recursive definitions hashes to the form
#x.nwherexis the hash of the cycle andnis the term or type’s index in its cycle. A cycle has a canonical order determined by sorting all the members of the cycle by their individual hashes (with the cycle removed). - A data constructor hashes to the form
#x#cwherexis the hash of the data type definition andcis the index of that data constructor in the type definition. - A data constructor in a cyclic type definition hashes to the form
#x.n#cwhere#x.nis the hash of the data type andcis the data constructor’s index in the type definition. - A built-in reference to a Unison built-in term or type
nhas a hash of the form##n.##Natis an example of a built-in reference.
Short Hashes
A hash literal may use a prefix of the base32Hex encoded SHA3 digest instead of the whole thing. For example the programmer may use a short hash like #r1mtr0 instead of the much longer 104-character representation of the full 512-bit hash. If the short hash is long enough to be unambiguous given the environment, Unison will substitute the full hash at compile time. When rendering code as text, Unison may calculate the minimum disambiguating hash length before rendering a hash.