Should I provide a deep clone when implementing ICloneable?

Question

It is unclear to me from the MSDN documentation if I should provide a deep or a shallow clone when implementing ICloneable. What is the preferred option?

Answer 1

Short answer: Yes.

Long Answer: Don't use ICloneable. That is because .Clone isn't defined as being a shallow or a deep clone. You should implement your own IClone interface, and describe how the clone should work.

Answer 2

Clones are deep by default, thats the naming convention and copy constructors can be shallow if they want, for performance reasons.

Edit: This naming convention goes beyond boundaries, its the same for .Net, Java, C++, Javascript, etc... the actual source is beyond my knowledge but its part of the standard Object Oriented lexicon, just like objects, and classes. Thus MSDN doesn't specify implementation because its a given by the word itself (of course lots of newcomers to OO languages don't know this, and they SHOULD specify it, but then again their documentation is quite frugal anyways)