Anthony Hannan <ajh18 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> Michael van der Gulik <mikevdg at hetnet.nl> wrote:
> > Alternatively, a "segment" may not have out-going pointers, and 
> > can only use an owning object as a sort of proxy should they need access 
> > to the outside world.
> 
> That's exactly what cross-pointers do.  They point from one segment to
> another on behalf of some objects within them.

Sorry, I responded to quickly.  I see what you mean.  An internal object
can't point to outside objects.  I can only find them through its owner.

Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> I've thought about this model for a while myself. I always ended up with
> thinking about the "meaning of assignment" when I got deeper into it,
> because at some point you may want to treat assignment more along the lines
> of unification (as in Prolog) rather than pointer sharing (as in Lisp).
> 
> There are some interesting technical properties when using unification
> instead of pointer sharing. For example, it appears to me that if
> unification ultimately goes down to the leafs of some object we'd get much
> better "locality" of memory references. In addition, it seems as if there
> should be almost no need for garbage collection (the object structure is
> preserved for the most part when you only assign leafs). Etc.

Interesting.  If the new structure does not match the old structure the
old object may have to be replaced anyway, although this should be rare.

Another thing that would help in a segmented image is having as many
objects as possible as immutable, then a remote immutable object can
just be copied to where it is needed.

andrew cooke <andrew at acooke.org> wrote:
> i'm a lurker here who has never used smalltalk.  i just wanted to point
> out, in case you were interested (and didn't already know), that there is
> a language that supports both logic variables and objects.  it's called
> oz/mozart and there's more information at http://www.mozart-oz.org/ (i
> haven't used that langauge either, but i'm reading about it in this rather
> interesting book: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/ ).

Thanks for the references, especially the book.

Cheers,
Anthony