I'm not really sure what you're looking for with this question. Are you talking in terms of design decisions made by the
Java guys when they created
equals(), or in terms of using
equals() in your own code? Any "alternate" checks for equality aren't supported by the general contract of object equality, so while it might seem helpful to write your own, be
very careful with it (I can't think of very many reasons to provide an overloaded
equals()). Be aware that your code would be the only code using your alternate implementation; it will not be used automatically by the collections API, for example.