2021-06-28
A file that contains multiple records of the same type does not need to repeat type tags for every value.
To read data from a file, a program needs to know how to slice the data into the primitive types of the programming language. It needs to know the structure of the data.
A structure of a person record may be a byte array followed by a one byte unsigned integer.
The semantics of the person record is that the byte array is the name of the person and the integer is his shoe size. Minimum description of the semantics is to give programmatic names to the fields to be used in programs that operate on the data. At the other extreme each field would have multilingual names and long descriptions. There may also be constraints on the value ranges of the fields expressed as functions.
To parse a data stream, the program needs to know the sizes of the values and their mapping to primitive types of the programming language. To load the data into user defined types, the program needs to know the semantics of the data.
Computer programs are installed in a directory tree and they resolve their dependencies in that tree.
What if running a program would only require its hash and it and it's dependencies would be downloaded on demand from a simple blob storage? The exact versions of each dependency would be fixed.
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