Scala, Java and equality

Question

val filesHere = (new java.io.File(".")).listFiles
val filesHere2 = (new java.io.File(".")).listFiles

scala> filesHere == filesHere2
res0: Boolean = false

That is quite counter intuitive. I would rather expect that filesHere and filesHere2 are equal.

This is certainly due to a semantics mismatch between Java and Scala, e.g., about arrays or (files) equality. Clearly, I am missing something here!

Answer 1

If I ruled the world, I would deprecate Scala's eq method on the grounds that the name is extremely confusible with equals and ==. Instead English does have a word which expresses identity as opposed to equality: I would simply call it is .

Similarly I would replace Scala's ne (which is a terrible name, since it's both an abbreviation and incomprehensible) with isnt .

Seems to me these could actually be added to AnyRef and the old methods deprecated, even at this late stage.