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Notes:
The basis of the active model architecture is a uniform term structure for representing mathematical expressions, geometric objects, material properties, physical laws and other types of information. Using a single common data structure for all objects simplifies the problems of linking one type of object to another.
The term structure directly permits representations of directed acyclic graphs with up to 232 – 1 sub-terms of any node. Automatic storage management is provided for terms using a conservative garbage collector. The nodes of the DAG are labeled to define the meaning of each term. Labels are globally assigned and only a few are reserved for use by the term structure mechanism. Examples are given in the following slides.
Terms may be serialized onto a byte stream, for transmission between processes on the same or different machine (and architecture), and for storing in files.
Finally, tools are provided to simplify adding the additional structures needed to make terms OLE objects. Based on our initial efforts, we will probably develop a Wizard for VC++ for this purpose.
The term structure library is implemented in C++, but all operations with the terms can be performed in C.