[ittvax!wxlvax!brooks: Saving/restoring objects.]

[Jim Meehan <Meehan@YALE.ARPA>]

*** Forwarded Message Follows ****
Received: from YALE-COMIX by YALE-RES via CHAOS; Mon, 5 Sep 83 18:35:01 EDT
Date: 5 Sep 1983 17:53:42-EDT
From: ittvax!wxlvax!brooks@YALE-COMIX
To: ittvax!yale-comix!meehan
Subject: Saving/restoring objects.


  Rumor has it that objects will be offered as a substitute for property lists
in future releases of T.  If they'll add a way to dynamically add/delete operations,
it seems a feasible idea.  (I still think a better answer is double-indexed
data as a scoped data type...)
The other problem that I'd like a solution to, even if property lists stay
around, is a way of writing objects to files and reading them back in.
Two possibilities seem viable:

  (1) an object->definition decompiler ala' DISCLOSE so that objects can be
printed out in symbolic form - a good thing for debugging as well, or

  (2) a way of saving objects in "binary" form - some PASCAL systems support
files of type INTEGER or STRUCURE to write things out in binary form.  This
has the advantage that things would probably read in very fast.


   Any idea of what is planned?  Do you have some other scheme for saving
objects?


*** End of Forwarded Message ****
-------