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From: raffael@mediaone.net (Raffael Cavallaro)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: True faiths ( was Re: The true faith )
Date: 21 Jan 2002 21:35:26 -0800
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Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message news:<3C4BE556.7040707@mail.com>...

> Well, the normal semantics of a copy are that the source and destination
> are not tied to each other after the copy is made. Of course, internally
> that might not be true, because you could be maintaining reference
> counts, and doing copy-on-write. You would place all that information
> into the routine name?

Why not?

clone
(returns a deep copy, with no references to original)

link
(shallow copy - just another reference to the original)

clone-on-write
(what it suggests - starts as a "link," but becomes a "clone" when a
client attempts to write to it.)