[elephant-devel] Re: Derived Indicies

[Leslie P. Polzer]

Wouldn't it make sense to generalize the class index mechanism?

At the moment we have one big global name space for indexed objects.
Storing everything there is hellishly expensive for many purposes.

Example:

  (intersection
    (get-instances-by-value 'message 'owner "Charlie")
    (get-instances-by-value 'message 'folder 'inbox)
    ...)

has unholy complexity and is therefore unsuited to numbers
as low as 1k objects.

It would be nice to store Charlie's inbox right in Charlie's
user object, making it a btree with indices defined by the
user in DEFPCLASS.

I wonder if it would be a lot of effort to generalize
GET-INSTANCES-BY... so it takes a class root parameter, and
to manage a multitude of indexed class btrees.

  Leslie