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Concept
Object copying
Summary
In object-oriented programming, object copying is creating a copy of an existing object, a unit of data in object-oriented programming. The resulting object is called an object copy or simply copy of the original object. Copying is basic but has subtleties and can have significant overhead. There are several ways to copy an object, most commonly by a copy constructor or cloning. Copying is done mostly so the copy can be modified or moved, or the current value preserved. If either of these is unneeded, a reference to the original data is sufficient and more efficient, as no copying occurs.
Objects in general store composite data. While in simple cases copying can be done by allocating a new, uninitialized object and copying all fields (attributes) from the original object, in more complex cases this does not result in desired behavior.
The design goal of most objects is to give the resemblance of being made out of one monolithic block even though most are not. As objects are made up of several different parts, copying becomes nontrivial. Several strategies exist to treat this problem.
Consider an object A, which contains fields xi (more concretely, consider if A is a string and xi is an array of its characters). There are different strategies for making a copy of A, referred to as shallow copy and deep copy. Many languages allow generic copying by one or either strategy, defining either one copy operation or separate shallow copy and deep copy operations. Note that even shallower is to use a reference to the existing object A, in which case there is no new object, only a new reference.
The terminology of shallow copy and deep copy dates to Smalltalk-80. The same distinction holds for comparing objects for equality: most basically there is a difference between identity (same object) and equality (same value), corresponding to shallow equality and (1 level) deep equality of two object references, but then further whether equality means comparing only the fields of the object in question or dereferencing some or all fields and comparing their values in turn (e.
Official source
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