I recently defined a copy method for an XML.jl Node. I thought I was doing the right thing to avoid deepcopy.
Nodes in XML.jl are immutable but they may contain some mutable elements, one of which may be a set of nested vectors of child Nodes. To copy a Node, it is also necessary to copy all it’s children. So my copy is not shallow.
I am working with XML to manipulate Excel .xlsx files. I have a library of Nodes in a Dict to provide a set of common Excel features and these each includes nested child Nodes. To add one to an xlsx file, I copy the Node from the library and then insert it into the internal XML structure of the xlsx file.
I can call the function I use to make a duplicate of the Node in the library anything I want, but functionally, I am making a copy. Is this to be frowned upon? And if so, what should I do instead? Just rename the function?