From: Michael Artz <mlartz@...>
Date: 2007-06-05T23:45:10+09:00
Subject: Deep Copy

I'm needing to implement a deep copy operation on a couple of objects,
and was wondering if there was a "best practices" for this sort of
thing.  I've seen the Marshal.load(Marshal.dump()) idiom, but I'm using
singleton classes which can't be dumped.  So I'm implementing my deep
copy similar to:

def deep_copy
  other = self.clone
  other.instance_var_1 = self.instance_var_1.clone
  other.instance_var_2 = self.instance_var_2.deep_copy
  other
end

where some of the instance variables are objects for which I've written
a deep_copy method.

The biggest problem with this method (that I can see), is that all of
the attributes of the object need to be publically writable, which is
undesirable.  Is there a better way to do this sort of thing?

Thanks,
-Mike

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