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.