14.9.3.4 Description

Object references are associated with ORB-internal identifiers that may indirectly be accessed by applications using the hash() operation. The value of this identifier does not change during the lifetime of the object reference, and so neither will any hash function of that identifier.

The value of this operation is not guaranteed to be unique; that is, another object reference may return the same hash value. However, if two object references hash differently, applications can determine that the two object references are not identical.

The maximum parameter to the hash operation specifies an upper bound on the hash value returned by the ORB. The lower bound of that value is zero. Since a typical use of this feature is to construct and access a collision-chained hash table of object references, the more randomly distributed the values are within that range, and the less expensive those values are to compute, the better.