It makes sense now but still it should be:
if (%longlinetimeout < 4)
The only reason I use the $hash identifier is to "shrink" the item name.
If the sentence is 300 characters long then the name (or in your case the value) will also be 300 characters long which is unecessary and impractical, a waste of space and blah blah... I can find a thousand cons... Instead of this, $hash gives you a single number!
The only disadvantage is that two seemingly irrelevant sentences may give the same hash number but given a big-enough number of bits, this will only happen very rarely, if not never!
Why does the double hashing bother you? After all $hash is very fast!
