«

What algorithm is used for hashCode for byte[]. Where do you look to
see it? Do you have to invent your own wrapper class to get a decent
one?

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.

"Roedy Green" <> wrote in message
news:...
> What algorithm is used for hashCode for byte[]. Where do you look to
> see it? Do you have to invent your own wrapper class to get a decent
> one?

From section 10.7 in the JLS:

The members of an array type are all of the following:
- The public final field length, which contains the number of components of
the array (length may be positive or zero)
- The public method clone, which overrides the method of the same name in
class Object and throws no checked exceptions
- All the members inherited from class Object; the only method of Object
that is not inherited is its clone method

That says that the it uses the equals and hashCode methods from Object,
which are actually native methods and thus VM dependent but are usually a
permutation of the address of the object itself.

What Sun really needs to do is to define an interface like Comparable for
use with HashMap and HashSet. This interface would implement the methods:

equals( Object a, Object b )
hashCode( Object a )

This would allow you to establish your own criteria for when objects are
equal.

--
Dale King