EQ: Checking the implementation of equality in Java

摘要

Objects in Object-Oriented languages such as Java are required to implement an equality predicate using the equals(Object) method in order to be compared with each other. This is particularly important when these objects interact with lists, sets, and maps from the Java Collection Framework. There are several considerations that must be taken in the implementation of this method, which, if ignored, will lead to subtle bugs. We present a tool called EQ that analyzes the source code to find such bugs.