 The C function builds a 16 hex character hash by concatenating a series of 8-bit Pearson hashes (collected in ).Instead of producing a value from 0 to 255, this function generates a value from 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (= 264 - 1).This shows that Pearson's algorithm can be made to generate hashes of any desired length by concatenating a sequence of 8-bit hash values, each of which is computed simply by slightly modifying the string each time the hash function is computed.