Shouldn’t they just call the attribute “objectIdentity” then? The fact that it’s used to access a hash table in some use cases doesn’t make it a “hash code”.

Shouldn’t they just call the attribute “objectIdentity” then? The fact that it’s used to access a hash table in some use cases doesn’t make it a “hash code”. You’d just as well call it an “equality checking code”, or name it after any other use case you could think of for a unique identifier. Ruby calls its equivalent construct “object_id” and that makes so much more sense.