Strings are special
By now you’ve seen that the String class is not just another class in Java. There are a lot of special cases in String, not the least of which is that it’s a built-in class and fundamental to Java. Then there’s the fact that a quoted character string is converted to a String by the compiler and the special overloaded operators ‘+’ and ‘+=’. In this appendix you’ve seen the remaining special case: the carefully-built immutability using the companion StringBuffer and some extra magic in the compiler.
