Metadata description

[olange]

Find a way to attach metadata to our data-structures.

Directions

Attach a metadata Symbol to data-structures. Use only native objects (Boolean, Number, String, …) to represent terminal values, instead of built-in primitive values – see first comment hereafter; good idea, but they do not pass in/out workers.

Motivation

• Ability to describe from where an object originates;
• Ability to describe the version of an object, and its creation time;
• Ability to describe how it was factored – which logic rules applied to automatically define that an accounting statement might be linked to a certain account to its debit; or that the account was instead provided by the user, overriding an automatically set value.

[olange]

Note that Symbol-properties do not get passed in/out workers by the structured clone algorithm (see Experiment 03 in olange/learning-service-workers), because they are not enumerable properties.

So if we would use a Symbol-property for the metadata and if we would implement the data-pipes as a service worker and sub-workers, then we would need to pass them as ordinary properties and eventually prune/graft them as Symbols upon reception in the browser context.