Question

Is there a way of making an associative array where each key is a hash of several objects? I’m not interested in inspecting each object’s state, but rather the object’s identity.

 var myarray = {};

 var a = new A();
 var b = new B();
 var c = new C();

 // + is not right, but illustrates the hashing I'm after.
 myarray[a + b + c] = 42;

The + operator is not right. In java I would arithmetically combine the System.identityHashCode() for each of these three instances and use the result to make my new hash key. Is there some similar mechanic in javascript?

Overriding the .toString() method in A, B and C is not an option since I’m interested in object identity, not state.

Answer 1

Actually impossible since Object keys in this language only can be strings and there’s no equivalent of java’s object identity.

:o)