From: Matthew Smillie <M.B.Smillie@...>
Date: 2006-01-30T16:06:39+09:00
Subject: Re: misunderstanding the Passing of references


On Jan 30, 2006, at 6:43, Todd S. wrote:
> In reading the link you suggest it seems I
> would have to use a seperate data dumping operation.  This seems a
> little strange to me.  Shouldn't there be a more simple way to  
> create a
> copy of an object?
>

There is and there isn't: Object#dup and #clone both make shallow  
copies:
http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Object.html#M001067

There's no built-in method to create deep copies of any object,  
though, and the serialise/unserialise thing just hacks around that in  
the quickest way (as in, quickest to write).

If it were me, unless the Model class was extraordinarily  
complicated, I'd probably just write my own copy method.

matthew smillie.