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> Objects are great if everyone agrees on the objects. In my
> experience,
> no one really wants to go that far, and information
> representation is a
> useful middle ground.
Perhaps some would find it useful to go one step farther, and associate data
with internal storage meta-representations (okay, I made that up). I bet
someone is doing this somewhere, with proper use of terminology, even.
Hashmaps, arrays, red-black trees, dictionaries, etc. all operate on pretty
much the same principles (at least in the OO languages) regardless of the
actual language they're implemented in.
Providing storage 'hints' to an application may seem like a step beyond
datatyping, but I think it's less intrusive. More of a suggestion than an
imperative. Combined with meta-object protocols [1], annotating an XML
document (or better yet, its schema) with this type of information could
improve productivity in some cases.
[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MetaObjectProtocol
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