ICloneable is a marker interface,
indicating that an object can be
cloned (that is, have a completely identical copy created). It
consists of a single method, Clone( ), which is
called by clients wishing to create a complete copy of the
ICloneable-implementing class.
When speaking of cloning, the terms deep copy
cloning and shallow copy cloning
indicate how deeply into the object graph a clone operation will
carry itself. A deep copy not only clones the object called, but in
turn seeks to clone any objects to which it holds reference. This
sort of operation must be handled by the programmer, usually by
calling Clone( ) in turn on each object this
object references. A shallow copy is a complete bitwise copy of this
object; any objects referenced by this object are also referenced by
the cloned object.
The simplest way to implement a shallow clone is to use the
Object.MemberwiseClone( ) method to copy this
object's fields directly and then return. A deep
clone also calls MemberwiseClone( ), but then also
asks each object reference held within this object to Clone(
) itself.
public interface ICloneable {
// Public Instance Methods
public object Clone( );
}
