Cloning

In computer science, cloning refers to the making of an exact copy of an object, frequently under the paradigm of instance-based programming, or object-oriented programming(OOP). In most programming languages (exceptions include: Ruby), primitive types such as int, float, double, long, etc. simply store their values somewhere in the computer's memory (often the call stack). By using simple assignment, you can copy the contents of the variable to ... more

In computer science, cloning refers to the making of an exact copy of an object, frequently under the paradigm of instance-based programming, or object-oriented programming(OOP). In most programming languages (exceptions include: Ruby), primitive types such as int, float, double, long, etc. simply store their values somewhere in the computer's memory (often the call stack). By using simple assignment, you can copy the contents of the variable to another one: Copying primitive types in Java: Many OOP programming languages (including Java, C#, D, ECMAScript) make use of object references. Object references, which are similar to pointers in other languages, allow for objects to be passed around by address so that the whole object need not be copied. A Java example, when "copying" an object using simple assignment: The object is not duplicated, the variables 'original' and 'copy' are actually referring to the same object. The process of actually making another exact replica of the object,... less