What is the difference between `##` and `hashCode`?

Question

What is the difference between methods ## and hashCode?

They seem to be outputting the same values no matter which class or hashCode

Answer 1

## was introduced because hashCode is not consistent with the == operator in Scala. If a == b then a.## == b.## regardless of the type of a and b (if custom hashCode implementations are correct). The same is not true for hashCode as can be seen in the examples given by other posters.