Re: diagrams

Laurent Dube wrote:
> 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.
>

I'm not familiar with the term e-r, but now I understand what you meant.

> 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.

You should wait.  We are only days away from knowing which proposal we will
be using.  Vancouver isn't until the end of July.

> 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 ?

This acts as the temporary lock for accessing the parts of the object
structure and as the long-term write lock.  The APR has a MUTEX I'm using
for it now that requires 32 bits.  When I get around to optimizing things in
machine language this will shrink to 1-bit.  Other things will shrink also.