the Object class's clone method

hi

Im writing a clone method for my Student class. what I see from goggling is that I need to call " Student cloned = (Student) super.clone(); " this is the first statement in my clone method and I really dont know what it does.

I looked into the Object class and found that it didnt have any impletation it was " protected native Object clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException; " what I found out of it was that the method returned an Object object so it needed to be casted and it throwed an checked exception so I should mention it in my Student method head. But what I don't understand is why I need to call this super.clone method if my class extends from Object. What does the clone method of the object class do?

[743 byte] By [superdepora] at [2007-11-27 9:57:55]