Question

I saw this piece of code today and wanted to know is there a difference between

return (null==employeeName ? "": employeeName);

and

return (employeeName == null ? "": employeeName);

Answer 1

Not anymore.

It used to be the case, in the wild days of C and C++ that non-boolean expressions, were OK in if statements, so that there would be no difference, unless you made a classic programmer mistake and forgot an equals sign:

employee = null

would compile, but

null = employee 

would not.

This doesn’t matter in Java, because an Employee type isn’t a boolean, and the compiler, rather than the syntax, stops you from shooting yourself in the foot; but whoever wrote that was probably in the habit from their days of writing C.