Hi Colin,

To the degree that your conception is object-oriented, in the deeper sense,
it is not a problem.  Your object(s) know how to persist themselves and may
be considered to be extensive over that persistence -- it is merely that
their morphology has changed.

Are you trying to identify names in a known problem space (e.g. a space
defined by the limits of the techniques used) or to identify the problem
space that you're in?  For the latter, if you're going to generalise then
perhaps you should also wave the specialisation of 'perfect' reproduction.
So, even more generally, what you seem to describing is a special case of
morphogenesis in which a 'copy' is made, e.g. lazy evaluation and cached
computation can be thought of as slices in that process.

Best,
Huw




On 29 December 2015 at 21:32, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:

> > So what is this problem called?
>
> I refer to them as the problems of "transparent persistence" and
> "normalization".
>
> > What theory describes the possible
> > solutions?
>
> I'm not sure what theories, but database implementations address these
> issues in practice.  Your were describing Magma exactly up until the
> "loosen our definition" paragraph, however, there's no reason the
> other program could not be coded to access the Magma DB or files
> directly -- the complete meta-definitions are included as part of the
> connection process.
>
> > Are there classes of solutions that have similar trade-offs?
> > Where can I learn more?
>
> But, obviously you know about ODBMS's, so probably this isn't the
> answer you're looking for.
>
>
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