Question

I have a class of mine, lets call it TMyObject, which should return a slightly modified copy of itself.
So, one of its functions should return an object of the same type as itself:

function TMyObject.TrimEnds: TMyObject;
begin
  Result:= TMyObject.Create;
  Result.DoStuff;
edn;

Can I do that? Is it legit what am I doing?

I mean, I already tried it and the compiler allows me to do it, but I wonder if there will be long time/hidden negative effects.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thanks.

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Edit:
The new slightly modified copy will be saved to disk. It is some kind of ‘Save as…’.
How it works: The original object creates a copy of itself, instructs this copy to do some changes and to save to disk. Then the original frees the copy. This way I keep the original object in memory unchanged but I have a modified version of this to disk.

You may think that my object holds a picture. What I need is a function that returns a slightly modified copy of the picture.

Answer 1

but I wonder if there will be long
time/hidden negative effects.

I don’t see any, and I used to do this with my own linked lists, and never had any problem. I think it is pretty much the same as creating an instance in any other place.