In my Feature Flags book, I had a snippet of code that uses the CRC-32 checksum in order to map strings to integers for user targeting. In his review of the book, Adam Cameron suggested that my code was longer than it needed to be; and, that I might use the hash() function for brevity. This gave me pause; especially in light of James Moberg's recent post on using .hashCode(). I want to take a moment and step back and think about how and why I'm converting strings to integers in ColdFusion. The u...