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What is the difference between a deep copy and a shallow copy?


What is the difference between a deep copy and a shallow copy?


Solution

  • Shallow copies duplicate as little as possible. A shallow copy of a collection is a copy of the collection structure, not the elements. With a shallow copy, two collections now share the individual elements.

    Deep copies duplicate everything. A deep copy of a collection is two collections with all of the elements in the original collection duplicated.