SEI CERT Oracle Coding Standard for Java

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changes.mady.by.user David Svoboda

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When a nonfinal class defines a clone() method that fails to call super.clone(), cloning a subclass of this class will produce an object of the wrong class.

The Java API [API 2011] for the clone() method [API 2011] says:

By convention, the returned object should be obtained by calling super.clone. If a class and all of its superclasses (except Object) obey this convention, it will be the case that x.clone().getClass() == x.getClass().

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Failing to call super.clone() may result in cause a cloned object having to have the wrong type, with resulting unexpected or incorrect results when it is used.

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