In short imagine Java or C++ objects, but they can live in a soup in a persistent database.
Imagine if your programming assignments at school, were "open this database then write a client to talk to the object retrieved." That's what we actually had in PS-Algol in 86. Super cool!
> In short imagine Java or C++ objects, but they can live in a soup in a persistent database.
AllegroCache still exists today. So at least Lisp people don't have to imagine that. I wonder if that is one of the reasons why CL people in the 1980s came up with UPDATE-INSTANCE-FOR-REDEFINED-CLASS.
Yeah, you could supposedly upgrade all the software on a lisp systems without having to restart anything (assuming the developers implemented the various redefinition protocols correctly.)
You can definitely do that in an image-based Smalltalk system, it is necessary to support the code browsers. I imagine the lispm devs had the same reason.
https://archive.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/papers/download/MBC+88.p...
In short imagine Java or C++ objects, but they can live in a soup in a persistent database.
Imagine if your programming assignments at school, were "open this database then write a client to talk to the object retrieved." That's what we actually had in PS-Algol in 86. Super cool!