How do I calculate a good hash code for a list of strings?

Question

Background:

• I have a short list of strings.
• The number of strings is not always the same, but are nearly always of the order of a “handful”
• I

Answer 1

I see no reason not to concatenate the strings and compute the hashcode for the concatenation.

As an analogy, say that I wanted to compute a MD5 checksum for a memory block, I wouldn't split the block up into smaller pieces and compute individual MD5 checksums for them and then combine them with some ad hoc method.