Typed streams.

[Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com>]

Hi there,

	I was just about to use the stream typing information,
and I came to the conclusion that it can't do what I want =)
What I need is to be able to store the type that a stream
serialized to so that, should I not have the correct object
( with the same OAFIID ) to re-hydrate it, that I can do an
oaf query and fall back to some other type. Hence I need either:

void save (in Bonobo::Stream stream, inout ContentType type)
                                     ^^^^^
           raises (WrongDataType);

	Or; given the general consensus that inout parameters
are evil and error prone:

ContentType save (in Bonobo::Stream stream,
                  in ContentType type)
                  ^^
                  raises (WrongDataType);

	This will nicely solve the problem; however, I'm not
stopping here, several object [ particularly containers ] will
need to serialize to a storage. The question is; is it worth
storing the 'Type' of a Storage ? This would imply that more
than 1 object was capable of reading a Storage structure; I
can't think off hand of any circumstances where that would
happen, indeed it would seem to me that if you don't have the
object that wrote the storage you are stuffed. If other people
think differently, we should put typing information onto
storages.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks@gnu.org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot