How come the object "person1" and the object "person2" are the same?

Question

In this program, whenever you change person1 or person 3, they become contain the same values. I tried going through each step in pseudo code, but I get lost on the reasoning behind these two objects always being equal. Could you help explain these steps? I would really love to understand. Thank you for your time.

public class References1
{
    public static void main (String[] args)
    {
        Person person1 = new Person ("Rachel", 6);
        Person person2 = new Person ("Elly", 4);
        Person person3 = new Person ("Sarah", 19);

        System.out.println ("\nThe three original people...");
        System.out.println (person1 + ", " + person2 + ", " + person3);

        // Reassign people
        person1 = person2;
        person2 = person3;
        person3 = person1;


        System.out.println("\nThe three people reassigned...");
        System.out.println (person1 + ", " + person2 + ", " + person3);

        System.out.println();
        System.out.println ("Changing the second name to Bozo...");
        person2.changeName ("Bozo");
        System.out.println (person1 + ", " + person2 + ", " + person3);

        System.out.println();
        System.out.println ("Changing the third name to Clarabelle...");

        person3.changeName ("Clarabelle");
        System.out.println (person1 + ", " + person2 + ", " + person3);
        System.out.println();
        System.out.println ("Changing the first name to Harpo...");
        person1.changeName("Harpo");
        System.out.println (person1 + ", " + person2 + ", " + person3);
    }
}

Answer 1

These are the lines causing your problem:

// Reassign people
person1 = person2;
person2 = person3;
person3 = person1;

If the variables had the following starting values:

person1 = "A";
person2 = "B";
person3 = "C";

... and then you ran it through your code:

person1 = person2 -> person1 is now set to "B" (the value "A" is discarded)

person2 = person3 -> person2 is now set to "C"

person3 = person1 -> person3 is now set to the value of person1 which is "B"

So now variable person1 and person3 are set to the same object.