Java string declarations

[Atreyo Bhattacharjee]

Just out of curiosity, why can we declare Strings in Java like:

String str = "Cake";

If String is a class, and to make an object with all other classes we need to write something like:

Object muffin = new Object();

 

[Brian28]

Because when they wrote the specs, they wanted to define String constants even though String is not a primitive. Nobody would want to use Java if you had to write
String str = new String(new char[] {'C','a','k,'e'});