References to objects and variables and their values.

Question

When does declaring a primitive type, variable or object as another objectm primitive type, or variable assign the variable THAT VALUE, and when does it just make it another reference to that object. And when it DOES just refer to that object, how do I set it to the value instead of just a reference?
I can elaborate if necessary. I hope I was clear enough

Answer 1

KeganO wrote:
Yes, that's very clear. So all I want to know now is, if I had in my code something like
Point a = new Point(1, 1);
then say 50 lines later, I want to create a new point object, with the same VALUE as a but does not refer to the same object. How would I do that?That depends on the class. Look at Point's docs. If it implements Cloneable, you can call clone(). If it has a constructor that takes a reference to a point as an argument (copy constructor), you can use that. Otherwise you'll have to extract the two values and call new Point(oldPointX, oldPointY).
Some classes you might not be able to do it at all.
There's no guaranteed way to do it provided by the language though. It all depends on whether the class is implemented to provide it.
>
Also, what are the code tags?When you put code into a forum message, in order to preserve formatting, you put it between [code] and [/code].
[code]
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
if (something) {
doStuff(i);
[/code]
becomes
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
  if (something) {
    doStuff(i);
}