On Java 7's equals() and deepEquals()

Question

Method description says:

Returns true if the arguments are deeply equal to each other and false otherwise... Equality is determined by using the equ

Answer 1

String[] firstArray  = {"a", "b", "c"};
String[] secondArray = {"a", "b", "c"};

System.out.println("Are they equal 1    ? " + firstArray.equals(secondArray) );
System.out.println("Are they equal 2    ? " + Objects.equals(firstArray, secondArray) );

System.out.println("Are they deepEqual 1? " + Arrays.deepEquals(firstArray, secondArray) );
System.out.println("Are they deepEqual 2? " + Objects.deepEquals(firstArray, secondArray) );

will return

Are they equal 1    ? false
Are they equal 2    ? false
Are they deepEqual 1? true
Are they deepEqual 2? true

How come the "shallow" equals methods return false? This is because in Java, for arrays, equality is determined by object identity. In this example, firstArray and secondArray are distinct objects.

Doing String[] secondArray = firstArray instead will therefore return true for all four tests.