Taking a copy of an object

[Derek]

On Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:12:03 -0600, Hasan Aljudy wrote:

> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Derek Parnell wrote:
>> 
> <Snip>
>>> And maybe one day (hoping against precedent) that Walter will actually 
>>> see
>>> that an operator for copying stuff is not such a stupid idea.
>>>
>>>    auto backup := q; // invokes q.onCopy() if it exists.
>>>
>> 
>> Yes, I think that would be quite useful.
>> 
> 
> Oh please, I hate the := operator, it's too ugly.

I don't give a damn what operator is used, this was *JUST AN EXAMPLE*. 

Please, feel free to suggest other things that might be suitable for a
deep-copy operator. One that would be usable on all data types and meants
that the information in the left-hand-side thingy would be copied and the
right-hand thingy would 'hold' that copy.

For objects, it would invoke onDup/onCopy/onClone/onDeepCopy/onWhatever
(the name doesn't matter) if it existed, otherwise its a compile time
error. The function would return the same datatype as the object that owns
the function, meaning that Foo.onDup can't return a Bar or its parent type
or an interface - it must return a Foo object instance.

For arrays it is identical to the .dup property.

For basic datatypes it is identical to moving the bit value from one to
another variable (no conversion or transformations allowed).

Therefore the lefthand side and righthand side thingy must be the same
datatype.

-- 
Derek Parnell
Melbourne, Australia
"Down with mediocrity!"