[Swift-devel] [Bug 76] disable intermediate stageout of data

[Ben Clifford]

so I was thinking the other day while poking through code.

'data' in SwiftScript terms is mostly represented by DSHandle objects.

such objects (which can have one of several implementing classes, and 
potentially more in future) have a number of properties, such as:

 .  value - what the 'value' is, for adding to other values, using @strcat 
on, performing array/member access using [] and .

 . submit-side location - what is extracted with @filename and used when 
that 'data' is passed to an application rather than being operated on by 
submit-side functions.

Neither of these are compulsory (and I think in practice at the moment it 
works out that you either have a filename or a value and never 
meaningfully both).

So a different model of mapping (which might work better when we want data 
that doesn't necessarily exist as discrete files or as in-memory values - 
the two examples that I've seen talked about are 'data from an sql 
database' and 'constants in a csv file') might be that mappers generate 
DSHandle trees (specifically a mapper generates a DSHandle, which might 
have descendants). Those DSHandles might have values, might have 
filenames, might have other attributes, might have ongoing annotation 
(which could include keeping track of where within-this-run copies have 
been made).

--