copying (was "veryDeep mysteries")

Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se
Tue Mar 13 09:24:17 UTC 2001


Craig Latta wrote:

> What is the advantage of DeepCopier over a shallow-copy/post-copy
> scheme?

In short, vDC copies object trees with shared nodes correctly. If one
instance in the tree point is pointed to by two others in the tree, in the
copy this instance (ie. a copy of it) will be shared as well.

vDC is the way to go for potentially very large structures/general uses
(such as the ability to duplicate any morph), whereas it is probably
overkill for well defined and/or small copying purposes.

Henrik






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