Actor path is a unique path to an actor that shows the creation path up through the actor tree to the root actor. ActorPath defines a natural ordering (so that ActorRefs can be put into collections with this requirement); this ordering is intended to be as fast as possible, which owing to the bottom-up recursive nature of ActorPath is sorted by path elements FROM RIGHT TO LEFT, where RootActorPath > ChildActorPath in case the number of elements is different. Two actor paths are compared equal when they have the same name and parent elements, including the root address information. That does not necessarily mean that they point to the same incarnation of the actor if the actor is re-created with the same path. In other words, in contrast to how actor references are compared the unique id of the actor is not taken into account when comparing actor paths.

public abstract class ActorPath : IEquatable<ActorPath>, 
	IComparable<ActorPath>, ISurrogated

Public MustInherit Class ActorPath
	Implements IEquatable(Of ActorPath), IComparable(Of ActorPath), 
	ISurrogated

public ref class ActorPath abstract : IEquatable<ActorPath^>, 
	IComparable<ActorPath^>, ISurrogated

[<AbstractClassAttribute>]
type ActorPath =  
    class
        interface IEquatable<ActorPath>
        interface IComparable<ActorPath>
        interface ISurrogated
    end