to carry out that rather obvious step, I was bound to consider
all the implications of choosing a given layout and handling pattern
for our external structure representation.
Finally, I settled upon the following decisions
- the value space represented within the DataCap is flat, not further structured
- the distinction between "attribute" and "nested object" is merely conceptual
and will be enforced solely by the diff detection / representation protocol
- basically, a nested subtree may appear as an attribute; the difference
between attributes and children lies solely in the way of access and referral:
by-name vs. positional
- it is pointless to save space for the representation of the discriminator ID
- but we can omit any further explicit type tag, because
- we do *not* support programming by switch-on-type, and thus
- we do *not* support full introspection, only a passive type-safety check
- this is *not* a limitation, since we acknowledge that GenNode is a *Monad*
- and the partial function needed within any flatMap implementation
maps naturally onto our Variant-Visitor; thus
- the DataCap can basically just *be* a Variant
- and GenNode has just to supply the neccessary shaffolding
to turn that into a full fledged Monad implementation, including
direct construction by wrapping a value and flatMap with tree walk
Ichthyostega
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