wsmith@mdbs.UUCP (Bill Smith) (12/14/89)
I have done more thinking about my technique of storing objects in a file that I used in Leif. As I feared, I did not address some of the more difficult problems which will make my solution inadequate for the general case. The problems that I can think of off the top of my head are: 1. Pointers into the middle of a structure: There is not clean way to find the beginning of the structure that is being addressed in this way. 2. Pointer pointers that are not pointers to an array of pointers: Pointer pointers are usually pointers into the middle of a structure and even when they are not, there isn't normally room allocated to give the traversal algorithm something to bite on. It is a difficult problem if you do not make a few simplifying assumptions or build hooks into the language implementation that make finding the necessary information for a depth first or breadth first traversal of the data in a computationally efficient way. Bill Smith (the known world)!pur-ee!mdbs!wsmith (Not mdbs opinions)