hashing strings to integers

[Dan Sommers]

On Tue, 27 May 2014 17:02:50 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> - rather than "zillions" of them, there are few enough of them that
>  the chances of an MD5 collision is insignificant;

>   (Any MD5 collision is going to play havoc with your strategy of
>   using hashes as a proxy for the real string.)

> - and you can arrange matters so that you never need to MD5 hash a
>   string twice.

Hmmm...  I'll use the MD5 hashes of the strings as a key, and the
strinsgs as the value (to detect MD5 collisions) ...

(But I'm sure that Steven was just waiting for someone to take that
bait...)