Re: Qs re 'Write & 'Read

Thomas Wolf wrote:
> david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com wrote:
> 
>><tmoran@acm.org> wrote in message news:02qFa.1186062$F1.140501@sccrnsc04...
>>
>>>>the string itself is preceded by its contstraint, access types are
>>>
>>written
>>
>>>>to the stream with a boolean value preceding the data (if any).
>>>
>>>  Sounds right.
>>>
>>>
>>>>It surely seemed to me like the language standard could have defined
>>>>something like this as the default for access types, but alas, it did
>>>
>>not.
>>
>>>  I can see there would be difficulties for general access types, but
>>>heap access types seem easy enough.  Unless storage pools cause
>>>difficulties.
>>
>>Maybe my mind's just in a fog today, but please explain why there'd be
>>a problem with any kind of access type -- general, or not, using my
>>approach.
> 
> 
> Cyclic self-referential data structures. It's clearly out of the
> standard's business; it's up to your application to define how
> a graph (cyclic or not, tree-shaped or not) is to be written to
> and read from a stream.

   I would not say that it is totally outside standard's business... It 
clearly adds complexity to the compiler/run-time, but Java does that 
automatically (and it detects circularities).

Rodrigo