diagrams

I've spent part of the weekend studying your code. Compliments!
Clean coding. Felt at home right away.

About the diagrams, I was suggesting we make e-r type diagrams of
the different proposals concerning:

>   object, prototype, class, instance, factory, type, metaclass, etc.

Your response was to describe the contents of the C representation
of "object". That's useful and interesting, and actually we can push
this to documenting graphically the whole code, hopefully using
automated tools. As an exercise, I've re-arranged what you sent
into a text table format (see below).

But... what I was hinting at was a description of the terms as to their
hierarchy, contents, relationship, rules, restrictions, etc. and how
these change between the various proposals. 

If not in a drawing, maybe as a table?

We should at least do the current proposal, as it would be an essential
part of the Vancouver presentation.

  Laurent Dube

_______________________________________________________________________
Prothon object

* refers to:
    prototypes      single or list
* has:
    attributes      optional
    data            optional
_______________________________________________________________________
C representation of Prothon object

* has:
    immediate storage

        status        32 bits     (details below)

        composition   32 bits     pointer to single prototype or
                                  pointer to prototype list and/or
                                             attribute dictionary
        data          64 bits     immediate data or
                                  pointer to separate data

      ? write lock    32 bits     write-lock semaphore ?

    optional separate storage

        list of prototypes
        dictionary of attributes
        separate data
_______________________________________________________________________
status

* has:                       bits
    deletion state            2   not deletable, deletable, deleted
    data type                 2   none, immediate, separate, C function
    data length               4   length of immediate data
    read access               2   guest, user1, user2, admin
    write access              2   guest, user1, user2, admin
    unclonable                1   0/1
    archived                  1   0/1
    immutable                 1   0/1
    scanned                   1   0/1
    has attributes            1   0/1
    delete lock               1   0/1
    read lock count           7
    write lock request count  7
_______________________________________________________________________