Re: Lisp Serialization: GZ support?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "PJ" == Paul Johnson <address@hidden> writes:

PJ> Even the terms they think are basic and obvious like "compound"
PJ> are for me puzzling and mysterious.

A `compound' type is a type made up of a fixed number of primitive types.
Another word for it might be a `record' or a row in a spreadsheet.
It's like an Object with integers or doubles in it, but no subobjects.

Types that have this attribute are what you'd get out of saving
something `shallow' to HDF5 in Swarm.  Compound types in HDF5 have
advantage that since the types are simple and rigid, that saving them
can be very efficient as the memory layout is fixed.

In case you are wondering, strings are saved by making a dictionary of
all the known strings and then numbering them sequentially, using the 
number as the reference.

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