RE: APIs, messaging

[Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@propylon.com>]

A data-head, a doc-head, an object-head and an infoset-head were
travelling through the Irish countryside.

"Look", said the data-head, "there is a black cow on the hill. We
could easily cut it into well structured bits. We could eat a few,
sell a few and move on to the next hill..."

"Look", said the doc-head, "there is obviously a complete herd of cows
over here as we can see one of them on the hill". It may be
possible to decompose any given cow into pieces but we best not say
anything more concrete. After all, it may be that cows appear as
parts of other cows. Or worse, that the very act of observing
the cow would cause new cow-related properties to appear out
of thin air.

"Look", said the object-head, "A cow has been instantiated using the
put-it-on-top-of-the-hill pattern over there. It almost certainly
contains component parts but without access to the API we cannot
possible tell."

"Look", said the infoset head. "A complex series of DNA and RNA
combined with amounts of water, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen, has come,
via the post-observation-instantiation precipitated by our arrival, to
bear a non-zero probability of conformance to the meta-architecture
type known as "cow".

Sean