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I am reading Effective Java and the book has the below comment on the clone method.
In practice,
a class that implements Cloneable is expected to provide a properly
functioning public clone method. It is not, in general, possible to do so unless
all of the class’s superclasses provide a well-behaved clone implementation,
whether public or protected.
Can anyone give examples of why this can’t be done ?
Imagine one of the base classes has a private field that to be copied in a specific way for a “clone” to be semantically valid.
If that base class does not provide a correct clone implementation, the derived class can’t either – it has no way of building that private field correctly.