I've expressed before that I feel that the use of the word "clone", does not really capture what we are doing here, in fact, due to its use in biology, it leads to some incorrect thinking about what is going on. In biology, a clone is a separate entity with its own life-cycle, they have the same DNA, but can have entirely different lives. In Leo, a clone is the same entity, what you do to it in one place, (or to its descendants), gets passed on to the clones in all the other places, not because of some code running in the background updating all the copies, there are no copies, there is only one node, but it is reachable from multiple places.
In the talk on Leo I gave at PyOhio, (to which there is a link Leo documentation), I tried to convey this by making an analogy to the computer game "Portal", if you have some room you want to get to, you can create multiple ways to get to it with your portal gun. There is only one room, but now you have made several different ways to get to it. In a recent thread, Edward said that a clone is a node with multiple parents. That was revelatory to me, I'm still thinking over the implications of that. To me it shifts what "being a clone" means from the node to the path to the node. Visually, it means that when walking down the corridor to our node, there are now side corridors that join into it from anywhere we want in own outline. On Monday, May 4, 2020 at 12:23:08 AM UTC-4, Thomas Passin wrote: > > I'm always in favor of good separation of interests. It can be hard to > achieve in practice, and it's always helpful to be diligent about keeping > one's eye on the ball. What I'm reading here sounds pretty interesting. > > About clones, we always talk about cloning nodes, but it seems to me that > what actually gets cloned is an entire subtree - that is, the clone > includes (clones of) a node's descendants. Perhaps a change in the > conceptual model of clones from nodes to subtrees would make it easier to > work out how to handle them. > > I'm not sure how a subtree is currently modeled in Leo. Since a tree can > be built out of nodes that have child and parent nodes, one can be > constructed without an explicit model for a (sub)tree. But since many > operations we want to do are really on (sub)trees and not nodes, maybe an > explicit tree concept in addition to a node concept would be useful(if > there isn't one already). > > On Sunday, May 3, 2020 at 6:12:04 PM UTC-4, SegundoBob wrote: >> >> I've been thinking about implementing a directed graph editor for a long >> time. Of course, most of my thinking is based on my use of Leo-Editor and >> my limited understanding of its internals. I've done only a little >> implementation of my ideas. I have not produced anything of use to me or >> of interest to anyone else. >> >> But several months ago, I concluded that Leo-Editor positions are a very >> bad idea and that using GNX's instead would be much simpler and much more >> robust. I also concluded that in a directed graph, I don't need clones >> because multiple parents is no big deal in a directed graph. Consequently, >> I stopped worrying about clones. So I don't know if clones make GNX's >> inadequate as pointers, requiring that v-nodes be used as pointers instead >> of just GNX's. >> >> For the little it is worth, in so far as I understand Vitalije, and I >> don't completely understand him, I think he is right. >> >> Respectfully, >> SegundoBob >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/9d69b6f1-179c-48aa-9f24-1979ed5a8b02%40googlegroups.com.
