Clipboards + Meaning

[Eric W. Biederman]

>>>>> "Jano" == Jano John Akim Franke <j.j.a.franke@t-online.de> writes:

Jano> This understanding should not be hardcoded, instead a form should be
Jano> found
Jano> for storing this information that enables similar systems to
Jano> "understand"
Jano> the meaning by providing as much information as needed to have a link
Jano> between the information stored and the using system.

Standardization.  That's the hard people problem.  Either that or you
can use general intelligence the hard AI problem.

[snip]

>> Or more simply you make a system wide object system available.  Make
>> lots of standard and semistandard object types.  Then you can
>> communicate more clearly, by passing both the message/object, and how
>> to understand the message (it's type).

Jano> Do you require passing the "type". If so, this would lead to eventually
Jano> incompatible parallel development of APIs with all its disadvantages,
Jano> wouldn't it?

Passing type information yes.

parrallel development of API's is healthy.  
C++ unfortunantely doesn't work well with this.

Jano> I would prefer a more fuzzy thus open storage. So instead of passing an
Jano> explicit "type" to point to the "API" the latter (information) should
Jano> find/link to the message/object (information). So you can substitute or add
Jano> an "API" without restructuring the passing object to pass another "type".

This is not a operating systems issue but an issue in the design of
your type system.

In general an object reference has a data location, and a pointer to
the a table of functions to manipulate that data.  The important point
is that the table of functions to manipulate the data is not needed to
be derived from the data (as in C++).  Therefore all you need to do is
change the functions, to what is expected.  The negotiation however
can get tricky.

Further this global object system must essentially be implemented with
either shared libraries,  or out of process procedure calls, to a
server that effectively acts as would a shared library but is more
reliabe/secure because it is in a different process (on who knows
which machine).

Look at CORBA & ActiveX for attempts to implements this system wide.

Eric