shaw@paralogics.UUCP (Guy Shaw) (09/09/89)
And now, for something completely different. In article <DCMARTIN.89Aug18085127@lisp.eng.sun.com>, dcmartin@lisp.eng.sun.com (David C. Martin) writes: > It would be nice if no one ever had to consider if a pointer was persistent > or non-persistent, but someone will have to build the access methods and > other low-level interface routines to your storage manager in order to > provide this type of "pointer swizzling" to the application developer. "pointer swizzling". Oh, I like it. It has a nice ring to it. This article was the first I had seen of that usage. Is it already known among OODB cognoscenti, or did David Martin just coin a new sniglet of usage? If he did, it seems to have been done very successfully. Several articles since, in this thread, have picked up on it, at first in quotation marks, then without, all as natural as can be. Offhand, it just looks like one of those times when a concise word was needed for the concept being discussed, and none yet existed. Fortunately, we didn't get stuck with some ten dollar word, where a concise and informal word will do, for now. And now, back to your regularly scheduled OODBMS vs. RDBMS debates. -- -- Guy Shaw Paralogics paralogics!shaw@uunet.uu.net or uunet!paralogics!shaw
maier@bdblues.inria.fr (David Maier) (09/12/89)
I tried to track down the source of "pointer swizzling" about three months back in response to a request from Larry Rowe. I first heard it at Servio Logic around spring of 1983. I talked to a couple of people who were at Servio then about where it came from--whether it was coined at Servio or not. Nobody was sure. One person speculated that it might have arrived with the Tektronix Smalltalk contigent who joined Servio early on: Jason Penney, Paul McCullough, Alan Purdy. The earliest place I could find it written down was in an internal memo by David Schrader (now at DEC Colorado Springs) from the summer of 1983. So it's not new usage, although has been only recently that it seems to have come into wide currency, I imagine because so many people are thinking about the problem now. Dave Maier Gip Altair maier@bdblues.altair.fr (on leave from Oregon Graduate Center)