[Vimoutliner] Extending VO

[Scott Scriven]

* Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> What's an object tree?

In short, it's the name for the idea you described.

It's a pretty generic term...  a tree structure, where the nodes 
are objects (as in object-oriented programming).  It's one of the 
most common structures in programming, along with lists and hash 
tables.

The word "tree" isn't exactly right though, since in most 
languages the objects in are kept in a free-form graph instead...  
leading to all sorts of complicated garbage collection and 
reference counting.  But at least in VO, the structure is pretty 
close to a strict tree.  (and on the filesystem, the structure is 
also very tree-like)

Storing the outline in the filesystem as you described is 
basically an attempt to make a limited object database, except 
using a standard filesystem instead of a custom database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_database

> how about XML, or maybe Ruby YAML?

Those lack many of the benefits of a filesystem, and XML also 
lacks most of VO's current readability.  However, XML is one of 
very few choices for working, widely-available object 
serialization.  I expect, at least, that import/export options 
for XML would be necessary, even if it's not the primary format.


-- Scott