Re: syntactic sugar vs. design

[Byron Ellacott <bje apnic net>]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Andrae Muys wrote:

> valid results are :
> [00,00,ff] - App 2 get's colour changed signal.
> [ff,00,00] - App 1 get's colour changed signal.

> However with element based atomic operations you can also end up with:
> [ff,00,ff] - App 1 and App 2 both get colour changed signal and update
> to corrupted value.

This is not, however, an argument for having them grouped in the data
model, it is rather an argument for transactions, which is already in the
todo. :)  The same thing can be applied to things that don't logically
fall into vectors, or even pairs:

enum EmailHandling {FORWARD, IGNORE, BOUNCE, FILTER};
char *ForwardAddress;
struct *complexFilterStructure;

Now, it would be terribly bad for these to be updated independently and
get out of sync with each other's meaning, but they're ill suited to a
vector, and ill suited to a pair.

-- 
bje