What's a POS?? (fwd)

Paul Prescod papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Fri, 09 May 1997 14:14:47 -0400


BRIAN SPILSBURY wrote:
> I think that weak-references will solve your issues in pretty much all
> cases with a little design. A weak reference being a refence that does not
> protect from garbage collection, and will be redirected to nil if the
> object its referencing gets collected.

As soon as you introduce this concept you are destroying the abstraction
of infinite memory. In other words, the "transparent object oriented
file store" is no longer transparent. Applications must make value
judgements of what must hang around forever and what is expendable.
That's what I was advocating.
 
 Paul Prescod