To harden the hash further, the last result is then sometimes fed through a finalisation function. The finalisation function can have several purposes such as compressing a bigger internal state (the last result) into a smaller output hash size or to guarantee a better mixing and avalanche effect on the bits in the hash sum. The finalisation function is often built by using the compression function. (Note that in some documents a different terminology is used: the act of length padding is called "finalisation".)
