Dear list, I don't know what's the correct term for this in the OOP context, but is it possible to "clone"/copy an instance of a reference class (say 'a') so that I get an *autonomous* second instance 'b'? Autonomous in the sense that changes to 'a' do not affect 'b'.
I know that this is somewhat against the pass-by-reference paradigm, but the motive behind this is to generalize the 'undo()' functionality described in the example of 'setRefClass()' to entire objects: I'd like to generate "images" of my object via a '$imageAdd()" method in order to generate a change history of the object (images are assigned to a field '.IMAGES' of class 'environment') that I can "load()" on demand to undo changes to my object. Obviously, simply assigning 'b <- a' does not work with respect to autonomy. Nor does exporting the object via 'b <- a$export(Class="A")'. I thought about creating a new instance b and then defining a function that maps the field values from a to b: b <- getRefClass("A")$new() fieldsMap(src=a, tgt=b) Is there already some functionality I can use? Thanks, Janko ########## SYSTEM INFO ########## Windows XP SP3 R 2.12.0 (patched as of 2010-11-22) Eclipse 3.6.1 (Helios) StatET 0.9.x ############################### ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel