An Initial Look at Abstraction Mechanisms and Persistence

摘要

One approach to supporting persistence in a language is to treat persistence as just another bit of functionality to be implemented in the language, rather than somehow making persistence a genuine part of the language. This is particularly useful for languages that already exist but do not have a notion of persistence. Success, not to mention the quality of the result, depends heavily upon the abstraction mechanisms available in the language, since it is the abstraction mechanisms that are used to simulate extension of the language. I have been involved in the design of a persistence mechanism that has been integrated in this manner into Ada and C++, languages having rather different abstraction mechanisms. This paper discusses the interaction between the languages' abstraction mechanisms and the persistence mechanism. In addition, it gives some initial thoughts regarding the integration of the persistence mechanism with ML, a language with yet another set of abstraction mechanisms.