To clone objects !!
Sometimes you need your classes to have their own copy of an object so that changing them in other classes do not affect it.
Immutable object like Wrapper classes in java.lang and
String do not need to be cloned since their content cannot be changed. But if you pass a Vector containing references to an object (now two objects are referencing that Vector) and you don't want the modifications of one object to be seen by the other one, then you need to clone the Vector.
Let us know if it's still not clear
HIH
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Valentin Crettaz
Sun Certified Programmer for
Java 2 Platform