Can objects be equal to each other?

The equals method for class Object implements the most discriminating possible equivalence relation on objects ; that is, for any non-null reference values x and y, this method returns true if and only if x and y refer to the same object (x == y has the value true).

The equals() method of the Object class compare the equality of two objects. The two objects will be equal if they share the same memory address . Syntax: public boolean equals(Object obj)

Since computing an object’s equality is a time-consuming task, Java also provides a quick way of determining if an object is equal or not, using hashCode() . This returns a small number based on the object’s internal datastructure; if two objects have different hash codes, then they cannot be equal to each other .