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  • "I'm not sure, but I think that in Java 7 or 8 oracle made an exception in the compiler to recognize str1 == str2 as str1.equals(str2)": I would not be surprised: Oracle seems to be less concerned with minimalism than Sun was. Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 10:55
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    If true, that's a very ugly hack since it means there's now one class the language treats differently from all others and breaks code that compares references. :-@ Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 11:02
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    @WillihamTotland: Consider the opposite case. Currently, if I create two strings, s1 and s2 and give them the same contents, they pass the equality (s1.equals(s2)) comparison but not the same-reference (==) comparison because they're two different objects. Changing the semantics of == to mean equality would cause s1 == s2 to evaluate true where it used to evaluate false. Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 11:30
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    @Brlfl: While that is true, that sounds like an exceptionally bad thing to rely on in the first place, as strings are immutable, internable objects. Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 11:37
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    @Giorgio: "Java 7 or 8 oracle made an exception in the compiler to recognize str1 == str2 as str1.equals(str2)" Nope, the Java Language Specification says: Reference Equality Operators: "If the operands of an equality operator are both of either reference type or the null type, then the operation is object equality." That's all folks. I didn't find anything new about this in the Java 8 early draft either. Commented Jan 21, 2014 at 23:47