@alanfo, yes, I think that is what Groovy does. That would be fine by me, though it breaks the simple connection between == and equals. But if we don’t want separate operators, it’s probably the best we can do. == will have to serve both purposes, and to distinguish manually we will have to use equals/compareTo. There is some discussions on this on the Groovy forums. But I don’t really suppose it’s feasible to change the operation of the == operator at this stage.