Integer Object Comparision Confusion

[panita lama]

Can anyone please explain why the following piece of code is behaving in this manner

public class IntegerDemo {
public static void main(String args[]){
Integer num1=20;
Integer num2=20;
Integer num3=150;
Integer num4=150;

if(num1==num2){
System.out.println("num1 and num2 are equal");

}
else{
System.out.println("num1 and num2 are not equal");
}
if(num3==num4){
System.out.println("num3 and num4 are equal");
}
else{
System.out.println("num3 and num4 are not equal");
}

}
}


Output:
---------------
num1 and num2 are equal
num3 and num4 are not equal

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Sridhar Santhanakrishnan]

IF the integer's value is between -128 to 127 then no new object is created and the same reference is returned. Thus, num1 and num2 are equal.

[panita lama]

Thanks a lot Sri

[Sridhar Santhanakrishnan]

And Welcome to Javaranch

[Joanne Neal]

Note that although the Java Language Specification requires the reuse of Integer objects in the range -128 to 127 as Sridhar explained, there is nothing to stop a JVM implementation from implementing the reuse of values outside this range as well. So , although in this case num3==num4 returned false, it is possible that in other JVMs it could return true i.e. you shouldn't write code that relies on num3==num4 returning false, where num3 and num4 are outside the range -128 to 127.