C# FileInfo uses reference equality, because that's the default for objects and they didn't override it. Why? I suppose they thought of it as a helper to get information about a file (or open it), rather than being a file handle itself. Or perhaps it wasn't clear what value equality meant for FileInfo. If two FileInfo point to the same file, but use different paths (relative paths, case insensitivity, hard links, etc.) should they compare as equal? Java just string-compares the two paths, but that's not what I'd want it to do. (I wouldn't want reference equality either. I'm not a big fan of reference equality, personally, and C# has gotten more value-equality oriented over time.)

Doesn't Java also have things that use reference equality? Arrays?