Out of My Depth

I scrolled to the comments section of this article looking for exactly that! Do tell!

Maybe somebody named his String variable string?

It's been a while since I worked on some Java but I believe it has something to do with one being a type (like int) and the other being an instance of the class String. I was always taught "just use String" but I'd love to know the real difference.

Google is not proving fruitful for this question.

Yeah, I don't think "string" is a thing in Java. Maybe he was comparing it to a data type from another language?

It seems there isn't. There is only one `String' datatype in Java, instance of class String, and no primivite `string' type. String literals represent instances of class String, as per http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-4.html#...

Perhaps author meant JavaScript, which does have primitive `string' type, distinct from instances of class `String'?

Maybe he's anonymised his experience slightly by subbing Java for C#: C# has a string and a String, although string is just an alias to System.String, so they're really the same.

It's not terribly confusing, although syntax highlighters do treat them differently which I could see could confuse the uninitiated.

Maybe the answer is that String is a class and string has no special meaning in Java?

It could be that the author was shown a bit of code where an instance of a String was called string (I've seen this many times as an argument name especially in methods for converting or manipulating a String value). But since the code wasn't mentioned we have no idea,

Seems like a nasty trick question to ask of an intern who doesn't know Java!

You probably know this, but I think the author is confusing a string literal with a lowercase string.

String a = "hello";

String b = "hello";

a == b will evaluate to true.

String a = new String("hello");

String b = new String("hello");

a == b will evaluate to false.

String literals in Java are put in to a string "heap" (might not be the correct word) and reused. Strings objects create a new instance for each string.