On Oct 10, 2007, at 11:54 , Klaus D. Witzel wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:37:44 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> On Oct 10, 2007, at 7:15 , Keith Hodges wrote:
> [...]
>>> Although many may not agree with me I think there is a lot of  
>>> potential
>>> for innovation using the chunk format, and it has the advantage that
>>> most people have the tools to read it already.
>>
>> It's incredibly flexible indeed, and goes back to the B5000 that  
>> inspired Smalltalk.
>
> Interesting. Having worked with almost all B5000 series and  
> successors and still working with them, what's the chunk format on  
> them (besides that it has no naked memory pointers, but descriptors)?

Maybe I should have wrote "the idea goes back", not chunk format  
itself. The idea to have the data itself specify how to be processed  
comes from there - the tapes had a loader program in front that reads  
the rest of the tape. I don't know much about the details.

- Bert -