Question

What I would like to do is to define a copy constructor which
takes A as an argument and it initializes the new A to be a deep
copy of argument A

public class A<E extends Comparable<? super E>> implements B<E> 
{
    private A a;
    private E[] hArray;

    // What I tried .... my copy constructor

    public A(A other)
    {
         this.a = other;  // deep copy
    }
}

Is this the right way of doing deep copy through copy constructor??

Answer 1

That’s not a deep copy. You are just storing the reference to the other object.

Try this:

public A(A other) {
    if(other.a != null) {
        this.a = new A(other.a);
    }
    if(other.hArray != null) {
        this.hArray = new E[other.hArray.length];
        for(int index = 0; index < other.hArray.length; index++) {
            this.hArray[index] = other.hArray[index].clone();
        }
    }
}

This assumes that E also has a copy constructor that performs a deep copy. Plus I just noticed that E is a generic, so my code might not work correctly for that (but the idea is there).