Question

I was experimenting with Java reflection and inlined Strings and came up with the result which I find confusing.

import java.lang.reflect.Field;

public class HappyDebugging {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        defineTrueFalse();

        System.out.println("true is " + true); // why is it "true is true"?
        System.out.println("false is " + false);
        System.out.println(true);
        System.out.println(false);
        System.out.println("true");
        System.out.println("false");
        System.out.println("true is " + Boolean.valueOf(true));
        System.out.println("false is " + Boolean.valueOf(false));
        System.out.println("true is " + Boolean.valueOf("true"));
        System.out.println("false is " + Boolean.valueOf("false"));
    }

    static void defineTrueFalse() throws Exception{
        Field field = String.class.getDeclaredField("value");
        field.setAccessible(true);
        field.set("true", new char[] {'f', 'a', 'l', 's', 'e'});
        field.set("false", new char[] {'t', 'r', 'u', 'e'});

        field = String.class.getDeclaredField("offset");
        field.setAccessible(true);
        field.setInt("true", 0);
        field.setInt("false", 0);

        field = String.class.getDeclaredField("count");
        field.setAccessible(true);
        field.setInt("true", 5);
        field.setInt("false", 4);
    }
}

Why are first two lines in the output are

true is true
false is false

I would expect them to be

true is false
false is true

Please note the output varies on different platforms.

Answer 1

In my compiler, those two lines get compiled to use the actual strings "true is true" and "false is false" (that is, no run-time concatenation occurs), so your reflective evil comes too late. You say that the output depends on the platform, so I guess some compilers must not perform this optimization.