From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2006-02-02T06:39:33+09:00
Subject: Re: misunderstanding the Passing of references

Matthew Smillie wrote:
> 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.

You can as well override or reimplement the #dup method.

    robert