| I think I miscommunicated. I understand hashtables effectively work from 'hashes' which imply collisions etc.. I'm so used to using the term 'hasthable' I forgot that it implies a specific implementation, I should have use the term 'Map' or 'Key/Value' table, I'm resigned to having used the terms interchangeably too often. The notion of 'hashes' which can produce 'collisions' creates a bunch of unnecessary concerns and complications given the ultimate objective of a hashtable, i.e. as a key-value store. If every object had a guaranteed unique global id, which we could use as a key, then this would provide a lot of clarity and avoid problems. Of course the word 'hash' doesn't really even belong in the context of the higher level abstraction of key-value store as it's implementation specific. Unfortunately, Java uses the word 'identity' in the System.identityHashCode which is really confusing. It's not really an 'identity'. It's misleading and I bet tons of Java devs are unaware (or forget). There's actually a bug on it [1] A few years ago, I had to spend a day down this rabbit hole, as many devs have to and it's just unnecessary. A better use of I think would really help. [1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-6321873 |