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The Eiffel class ANY contains features for shallow and deep copying and cloning of objects. All Eiffel classes inherit from ANY, so these features are available within all classes, and are applicable both to reference and expanded objects. The copy feature effects a shallow, field-by-field copy from one object to another. In this case no new ...
In computer science, having value semantics (also value-type semantics or copy-by-value semantics) means for an object that only its value counts, not its identity. [1] [2] Immutable objects have value semantics trivially, [3] and in the presence of mutation, an object with value semantics can only be uniquely-referenced at any point in a program.
Foo is a reference type, where a is initially assigned a reference of a new object, and b is assigned to the same object reference, i.e. bound to the same object as a, therefore, changes through a is also visible to b as well. Afterwards, a is assigned a reference (rebound) to another new object, and now a and b refer to different objects.
Some people (including Guido van Rossum himself) have called this parameter-passing scheme "call by object reference". An object reference means a name, and the passed reference is an "alias", i.e. a copy of the reference to the same object, just as in C/C++. The object's value may be changed in the called function with the "alias", for example:
Another complication with this approach is that, in languages with both reference types and unboxed value types, the garbage collector needs to somehow be able to distinguish which variables on the stack or fields in an object are regular values and which are references: in memory, an integer and a reference might look alike. The garbage ...
Object copy Value equality Object comparison Hash code Object ID Human-readable Source-compatible ABAP Objects — APL (Dyalog) ⍕x ⎕SRC x ⎕NS x: x = y — C++ x == y [52] pointer to object can be converted into an integer ID: C# x.ToString() x.Clone() x.Equals(y) x.CompareTo(y) x.GetHashCode() System.Runtime.CompilerServices ...
Using this technique, when a user asks the system to copy an object, it instead merely creates a new reference that still points to the same object. As soon as a user attempts to modify the object through a particular reference, the system makes a real copy, applies the modification to that, and sets the reference to refer to the new copy.
Copy constructors define the actions performed by the compiler when copying class objects. A Copy constructor has one formal parameter that is the type of the class (the parameter may be a reference to an object). It is used to create a copy of an existing object of the same class.