[GAP Forum] Is CrcString deterministic?

[Will Chen]

CrcString reads any input string and returns an integer to be thought of as
a "checksum".

Is the method deterministic? Ie, if I type in, say

CrcString("12jksma9-3oxz381sADd3");

on two different computers running different versions of gap, will
CrcString give the same output?

Of course it's possible that even if CrcString is deterministic, then the
implementation for CrcString may have changed over the years, which leads
to another question - when was the last time the implementation of
CrcString could have changed?

A related question is - are the commands for constructing finite simple
groups (and other families of common groups) deterministic?

For example, when I type in PSU(n,q) or PSL(n,q) or AlternatingGroup(n),
GAP seems to represent them as permutation groups. Is the representation of
these common groups as permutation groups deterministic? When I type in
PSU(...) or PSL(...), will I always get the same permutation group?

-- 

William Chen
Ph.D. Student & Graduate Teaching Associate
Department of Mathematics
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16801
chen_w at math.psu.edu
oxeimon at gmail.com