2.3. Shallow vs Deep Copy

Copy operations are distinguished by how they treat pointers:

This was a shallow copy:

This was a deep copy:

In this example, deep is preferred. That's not always the case. When we design an ADT we have to decide whether the things it points to are things we want to share with other objects or whether we want to own them exclusively. That's a matter of just how we want our ADTs to behave, which depends in turn on what we expect to do with them.

In this context, it should be noted that shallow and deep are actually two extremes of a range of possible copy depths - sometimes our ADTs call for a behavior that has us treat some pointers shallowly and others deeply.

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