• Intent:
  • Copying other’s object without making your code dependene on it. Clone existing objects as prototypes
• Problem
  • Creating an exact copy of an object from the outside may not be possible due to private encapsulation
  • Copying can be very expensive. Use when creating a new instance is cheaper
• Flow
  • Client receives object. Calls clone(deep: bool = True) on it, accepting a param defining if its a shallow or deep copy
• Solution
  • Create a shallow copy ⇒ for nested objects it provides the same reference (i.e., a pointer) to the nested objects. This will cause for mutable objects to be changed and the copy be affected.
  • Create a deep copy ⇒ recursively copies all nested objects included
• Copy
• Use cases
  • Loading data from a database
  • Complex calculations