Thread: Why is it that the generic equals method must accept a parameter of the type object?

That equals method is inside the Object class which is the top level class in Java. The Object class has no idea about any other classes that exist* so how can it have a method that takes a parameter with a type it does not know about?

* In fact when the Object class was written no other classes did exist.

In Java a method only overrides if it matches the same input types exactly.

class Base
{
    public boolean equals(Base b)
    {
        System.out.println("base equals");
        return false;
    }
}
 
class Child extends Base
{
    public boolean equals(Child c)
    {
        System.out.println("child equals");
        return true;
    }
}

Here, equals(Child) cannot possibly override equals(Base) because there's the possibility someone will call the function with a Base object (there's no "selective" overriding based on type).

void do_it(Base b1, Base b2)
{
    b1.equals(b2); // there's no way to know at compile time if b1 and b2 are Child objects
                        // only safe behavior is to call Base.equals(Base)
}

This obviously is not the desired behavior for polymorphic objects, thus the only logical solution is to allow equals to be called with a common base class. It was decided long ago in Java history that there would be one common base class Object. As a consequence, all Objects are comparable to other Objects and it's the users prerogative to do runtime type checking.

You can define your own equals method which takes a specific type, just realize that it won't behave polymorphically with base classes.

class A
{
    public boolean equals(Object obj)
    {
        if(obj instanceof A)
        {
            return this.equals((A)obj);
        }
        return false;
    }
 
    public boolean equals(A obj)
    {
        // ...
    }
}