Question

Possible Duplicate:
Integer == int allowed in java

What is the difference between the following two statements

Long l1 = 2L;
if(l1 == 2)
    System.out.println("EQUAL");                         
if(l1.longValue() == 2)
    System.out.println("EQUAL");

They both are giving same result “EQUAL”.But my doubt is Long is object. How is it equal?

Answer 1

As already pointed out in the comments, when doing

if(l1 == 2)

Long l1 gets automatically unboxed to its primitive type, long. So the comparison is between long and int.

In the second case, l1.longValue() will return the long value, as a primitive, of the Long represented by the Long object, so the comparison will be again between long and int. Answering your comment, take a look at What is the main difference between primitive type and wrapper class?

The link given in the comments about autoboxing covers this subject quite well.