Eric Mahurin wrote:
> Anybody know how to generically copy (shallow like clone) an
> object into another object?  It would be nice to handle the
> case where the objects have a different class, but I would at
> least like to know how to do it when the classes are the same.
>
> Here is an example of what I would like to do:
>
> dest = Object.new # or String.new if necessary
> source = "hello world"
> destid = dest.id
>
> source.clone_into(dest)
>
> dest             -> "hello world"
> dest.id==destid  -> true
> dest.class       -> String

Is the only difference between this and Object#clone that the object_id
is the same as the old object's? Because that's all I can see here, but
I don't understand why that would come in handy.