Question

I remember reading in some Java book about any operator other than ‘instanceof’ for comparing the type hierarchy between two objects.

instanceof is the most used and common. I am not able to recall clearly whether there is indeed another way of doing that or not.

Answer 1

Yes, there is. Is not an operator but a method on the Class class.

Here it is: isIntance(Object o )

Quote from the doc:

…This method is the dynamic equivalent of the Java language instanceof operator

public class Some {     public static void main( String [] args ) {         if ( Some.class.isInstance( new SubClass() ) ) {             System.out.println( 'ieap' );         } else {              System.out.println( 'noup' );         }     } } class SubClass extends Some{}