What's a POS??

[Paul Prescod]

Mike McDonald wrote:
>   That's why it's broken. Your version of a POS makes the assumption
> that most things are "valuable" and should be saved. That's just the
> opposite of the actual case in a lisp developement environment, which
> is the case I care about. So, to answer your question in the "Testing
> the waters" thread, "You don't want a POS?" No, I don't! I'd much
> rather have an object oriented database that allows me to decide what
> gets saved and when it gets saved.

I agree with Mike. An OOFS is important, but I don't think that it is
important that it be transparent. The app knows what is important to
save and how often to save it. Although I might happen to have a pointer
to something hanging around I might not want to save it. And what if
there is a large object I want to delete to save disk space but I don't
know where the references to it are? Do I have to search all references
to find out which point to it? Or does the OS store a reverse lookup
table from referenced objects to references to it.

I can see the ease-of-programming benefits of a transparent OOFS but I
don't think that the GC abstraction extends naturally to persistent data
on (perhaps small) hard disks.

 Paul Prescod