TPersistent.Assign procedure
Assign the contents of one class to another.
Declaration
procedure Assign(Source: TPersistent); virtualDescription
Assign copies the contents of
Source to
Self, if the classes of the destination and source classes are
compatible.
The TPersistent implementation of Assign does nothing
but calling the AssignTo method of
source. This means that if the destination class does not know how to assign
the contents of the source class, the source class instance is asked to assign
itself to the destination class. This means that it is necessary to
implement only one of the two methods so that two classes can be assigned to
one another.
In general, a statement of the form
Destination:=Source;
(where Destination and Source are classes) does not
achieve the same as a statement of the form
Destination.Assign(Source);
After the former statement, both Source and
Destination will point to the same object. The latter statement
will copy the contents of the Source class to the
Destination class.
See also
An experiment, built from development snapshots. Not the official Free Pascal or Lazarus documentation.