Object equality behaves different in .NET

Question

I have these statements and their\' results are near them.

string a = \"abc\";
string b = \"abc\";

Console.Writeline(a == b); //true

object x = a;
object y         


        

Answer 1

String has overloaded the equality operator so that you can use == for value comparison. Hence

a == b //true.

When you're downcasting them to object, you're only comparing references. String looks into an internal string-pool if another string instance is already available, otherwise a new instance will be created and added to the pool. So actually a, b, x and y are even the same reference, that's why

x == y //true.

With using the constructor of String, you're forcing .NET to create a new instance even if another string with the same value(length and character sequence) exists. That's why

k == m //false

http://en.csharp-online.net/CSharp_String_Theory%E2%80%94String_intern_pool