From: "Rob Withers" <rwithers12@attbi.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 05:17:48 -0500
Subject: Re: [e-lang] Serialization in Squeak-E (was: MAC calculation)

Mark, 

sorry I didn't get this one earlier.  It was food for thought. 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Miller" <markm@caplet.com> 
To: <e-lang@mail.eros-os.org>
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 11:42 PM
Subject: [e-lang] Serialization in Squeak-E (was: MAC calculation)


> At 06:21 PM 11/26/2002 Tuesday, Rob Withers wrote:
> >[...] Allowing active object graphs the facility to be boundless
> >in a network, yet bounded by POLA capabilities, is very interesting to me.
>
> That's very well put.  I think we can use that.  Thanks!

please do!   :)


> >It will be interesting to analyze, and a remote debugging capablity will be
> >critical.  Whatever serialization we settle on :), we should look into
> >whether we could exchange processes, lambdas, and contexts.
>
> Funny you should mention that.  We just had some interesting victories for
> distributed debugging of E code.  I hope to explain more about this soon...

I like the causality pane.   A great idea. 

> >> What's the current state of Squeak support for the Java serialization
> >> format?
> >
> >heh, why would we want to do java when we can do squeak?   Everyone is a
> >refugee here.  ;-)   sorry, there's no support for java serialization.
>
>  From earlier correspondence I thought there was, but don't worry about it.
> I hope to drop Java serialization as well.  There's no way to get past the
> perception that it's Java-dependent, and no one is pushing it as a language
> neutral serialization standard.

Yes, I thought so too, but it was only an import/export analyzer, not a
serializer. 

> Have you looked at Tyler's Doc and how Tyler's WOMP uses it for
> serialization?  CapTP is not WOMP (they have different semantics), but I
> hope to switch CapTP's serialization to something at least close to WOMP's
> serialization.  Other serialization proposals are certainly welcome, so long
> as they have both an XML form and an efficient form.  (I know the OMG has
> something here I need to examine.)

we are well into the issues, now.  Even if VatTP becomes outdated, I'll at
least have the experience. 

> >> Do you expect to use it for the initial CapTP experiments?
> >
> >I promise I will use all java serialization available in squeak: none. (how
> >does smart contracts deal with that assertion?)
>
> It is compatible with all deployed smart contracting systems!  Ha, take that!

:) 


> >  For the rest I will use
> >Reference stream, which pickles a graph of objects, with a forward reference
> >table..one pass.    It wouldn't be that hard for E to support, would it? :)
>
> I have no idea.  If it's a serious suggestion, I'll try to take a look at
> it.  But my first question is, does it escape the
> Java-serialization-perception problem?  Will it be perceived to be Squeak or
> Smalltalk specific?  Is anyone pushing it as a language neutral standard?

it is squeak specific. 


> >It would be nice to have the serialization algorithm become part of the next
> >rev of the startup negotition, wouldn't it?  XML, squeak reference, java
> >serialization, term trees, ..
>
> We definitely need to get the negotiation in there.  This negotiation should
> itself be textual, so binary-impaired participants can still play.  While
> there can be many surface syntaxes without much pain, it would be good to
> require no more than two: an XML-based one and an efficient one.  Above the
> surface syntax, I believe we will find we need to carefully define one
> abstract syntax (or, in x3c-speak, "infoset" or "document model") for the
> encoding and decoding of object graphs.

While you are thinking about this, should we do compression negotiation too? 


>
> http://www.erights.org/symbolic/overview.html and
> http://www.erights.org/symbolic/terml/terml-spec.html are my early drafts of
> a framework for organizing the examination of such matters, and of
> presenting term-trees partially within this framework. This page was written
> before I became aware of Tyler's Doc work, but I believe Doc should fit right
> in.  (I stupidly delayed announcing these pages until they were less rough,
> which never happened.)

they are on the stack. 


> >Auditors is very interesting work.  I'd like to support those somehow.
>
> Thanks!  Frankly, I don't know how to get to auditors from Squeak without
> some rather violent changes, but it's certainly worth a try!

hmmm....even more interesting. 

I am exhausted, so my response suffered for it. 

happy thanksgiving!   I'll be back next week,
rob



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