Thread: Object.clone()

Hi all,

Just learning java and have a question about Object's clone method. According to Suns Java tutorial, your class has to implement the Cloneable interface in order to use Object's clone method. If not, an exception will be thrown.

This seems a bit confusing. If Object has its own implementation of the clone method, and any class created implicitly extends Object, then why does your class need to implement the Cloneable interface in order to use it?

And if it DOES implement the Cloneable interface, doesn't this mean by definition that the class MUST implement all methods declared in the interface?

Could someone please clear this up and provide an example?

Thank you

Sorry for double posting, I was planning on deleting my original post because I thought this forum would be a better place for my question but I could not find a delete option.

Thanks for the quick response. Based on what I found, it seems that the empty interface is used to flag classes. They are checked with instanceof to see if they implement the empty interface and take action accordingly.

I can't think of a reason why you would want to do this, but I understand the syntax rules behind it now.

As from the API.

* The method <tt>clone</tt> for class <tt>Object</tt> performs a
* specific cloning operation. First, if the class of this object does
* not implement the interface <tt>Cloneable</tt>, then a
* <tt>CloneNotSupportedException</tt> is thrown. Note that all arrays
* are considered to implement the interface <tt>Cloneable</tt>.
* Otherwise, this method creates a new instance of the class of this
* object and initializes all its fields with exactly the contents of
* the corresponding fields of this object, as if by assignment; the
* contents of the fields are not themselves cloned. Thus, this method
* performs a "shallow copy" of this object, not a "deep copy" operation.
* <p>
* The class <tt>Object</tt> does not itself implement the interface
* <tt>Cloneable</tt>, so calling the <tt>clone</tt> method on an object
* whose class is <tt>Object</tt> will result in throwing an
* exception at run time.

// Json

This seems a bit confusing. If Object has its own implementation of the clone method, and any class created implicitly extends Object, then why does your class need to implement the Cloneable interface in order to use it?

The thing that always confused me most about the Object class is the fact that the toString() method returns a String, which extends Object. It seems to be the chicken and the egg situation...