shallow copy

noun, verb — 2 senses

shallow copy

nounalso spelled shallow-copy

Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences A copy of a data structure which shares any linked structures with the original.

If you modify that, you'll modify all the shallow copies of the header that points to it.

Antonyms: deep copy
Hypernyms: copy

shallow-copy

verb

To make a shallow copy of.

The bug came from trying to shallow-copy a mutable structure.

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — authors: page histories for shallow copy and shallow-copy.