At 12:48 AM 3/10/2005, Yanni Chiu wrote:
>What kind of objects are properties?
>Could they be made textual?

They are arbitrary. Most commonly they are textual, and there is a textual 
representation stored as well, as of VW 7.3.  Previously it BOSSed out the 
entire dictionary, now it has a record for each entry, with both a textual 
form and a BOSSed form. If all properties were restricted to be textual, 
one could get away without reading/writing the BOSS.

>I don't see why a source code versioning system should
>need object serialization. As it is, it seems unnecessary
>to base-64 encode method source. (I suppose it's due
>to LCD across RDB's).

The Base64 is actually Postgresql-specific, and is just how Bruce Badger 
chose to initially do it. He now wishes he'd done it differently, but 
changing it is a backward-compatibility issue, so has to be done carefully.


--
Alan Knight [|], Cincom Smalltalk Development
knight at acm.org
aknight at cincom.com
http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk

"The Static Typing Philosophy: Make it fast. Make it right. Make it run." - 
Niall Ross