From: George Ogata <g_ogata@...>
Date: 2005-05-01T07:02:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Cloning into an object

Eric Mahurin <eric_mahurin@yahoo.com> writes:

> Anybody know how to generically copy (shallow like clone) an
> object into another object?  It would be nice to handle the
> case where the objects have a different class, but I would at
> least like to know how to do it when the classes are the same.
>
> Here is an example of what I would like to do:
>
> dest = Object.new # or String.new if necessary
> source = "hello world"
> destid = dest.id
>
> source.clone_into(dest)
>
> dest             -> "hello world"
> dest.id==destid  -> true
> dest.class       -> String

I hear that evil.rb has Object#become, which will do that with some
caveats.  Search "Object#become" in the list archives for more info.