Testing the waters.

[Chris Bitmead uid(x22068)]

>  SO, are you proposing a persistent store or an OODB? They are
>definitely different beasts.

What is the big difference? You will notice that one of the ODBMSes on
the market is in fact called "object store".

>  Sure there is! It's either mail-folders or get-my-folder. :-)

Which is implemented as...

(define (get-my-folder list) 
   (filter (lambda (i) (equal? (my-name) i)) list))

Big deal.

>  Oh and you interface functions aren't symetrical, so you have a bad
>design for an ABI. :-)))

What? The mail folder ones? Well, not too bad for 3 seconds thought ;-)

>>A nice OS needs a standard way to store files. On Unix the standard is
>>ascii with new-lines. This is bad. This makes unnecessary work. This
>>is why we have perl and awk and sed. (Need I say more?)
>
>  You have a better way of storing unstructured text than as ASCII
>characters seperated by newlines? 

Yes.

>The advantage of flat files is they
>are more flexible than sturctured ones. 

No they're not.

>I can always build structure
>on top of a flat file but I may not be able to flatten a structured
>one. 

Building structure out of an arbitrary flat file is very hard
work. Turning structure into a flat file is easy. (It's called
"display").

Why you want to do this, apart from mindless grep exercises though, is
hard to understand.

>In your example, what if I want to search the entire message? 

I imagine anything like text will inherit from a common base class
which will supply appropriate search facilities.

>Now
>all of a sudden, your example becomes a lot more complicated than sed,
>awk, and perl. Or in my case, fgrep.

(set! *mail-item* ....)

(search-for (*mail-item* the-message) "foobar")