Jason Bloch's hashCode formula

[Gavin Bong]

In the book Effective Java, Jason Bloch proposed this hashCode formula (here shown for strings). What is the significance of the magic numbers 17 and 37 ? Is some number theory math wizardry involved ?

public int hashCode(){
   int result = 17;
   result = 37*result + ((this.value != null) ? this.value.hashCode() : 0);
   result = 37*result + ((this.code != null) ? this.code.hashCode() : 0);
   return result;
}

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Hi,
It's Joshua Bloch!
Other than their being prime numbers, there's no special significance to them; they're just values that empirically work well.

[Rocky Summers]

hi! just wondering what
this.value and this.value.hashCode() is...

[Gavin Bong]

value and code are the two member variables in my class, from which this code extract was taken from.

 this.value.hashCode(); // returns the hashcode for that member 

[Mac Lai]

Hi,
I try to use the formula below to implement the hashCode() of my class, say ClassA.
There are 6 String fields to be compared in the equals() and hence my hashCode() will include these 6 fields.
On using this formula, the calculated hash code is very large, sometimes it is negative, say -1342574843. I guess it is because the value is bigger than a int can contain. My question is: is there any harm about this? How come there is a negative sign? Thx.
public int hashCode(){
int result = 17;
result = 37*result + ((this.value != null) ? this.value.hashCode() : 0);
result = 37*result + ((this.code != null) ? this.code.hashCode() : 0);
return result;
}

[fred rosenberger]

as i understand it, you are basically creating a bit pattern as your hash key. for some strings, the top bit gets set to 1. this makes it negative. it shouldn't hurt anything.
i think...