Can objects be equal to each other?

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 .

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).