Copy / Clone method for handle and hgsetget class

Enable deep copying of child objects of classes handle or hgsetget

Description

The handle or hgsetget classes miss a method to make deep copies of objects. The two classes "handleplus" and "hgsetgetplus" take care of this.

To use these classes, ...
- simply put them somewhere on your Matlab path.
- in classdef-files change instances of
  "classdef MyClass < handle" (or hgsetget)
to
  "classdef MyClass < handleplus" (or hgsetgetplus)

Suppose you have defined a "MyClass" as child of "handleplus". Deep copies are now created as follows:
>> OBJ = MyClass;
>> OBJ_new = OBJ.copy;

Some short notes:
- This implementation (hopefully) also handles deep copying of inherited private or protected properties (s. discussion "Clone Handle Object - using MATLAB OOP" -> link in acknowledgments).
- It handles properties, which contain handle-objects
- It does not handle cyclic references (s. mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7629086&tstart=0)

Please read the help for these files for more details and report any bugs.

Cheers

Sebastian

Acknowledgements

Clone Handle Object Using Matlab Oop inspired this file.

• Required Products: MATLAB
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.13 (R2011b)
• Other requirements: This will only work for Matlab releases, which can handle the new OOP-style. To my knowledge, this was implemented in Matlab 7.6.

[Marc Crapeau]

The problem is this class cannot handle the copy of protected/private properties defined by the classes which derive from it. Thus we need to declare public all the properties of the children classes and so forget encapsulation...

It is not a criticism, there is no way to reach private and protected properties of a subclass from its superclass, so you cannot do better :)