long id

[juan_gandhi]

I think I got it where all this bs about passing around numerical ids of entities instead of entity references (maybe lazy) come from. It's like 'error code'. It comes from the ancient c programming, where we just could not allocate a string for a readable piece of text, or for the data that may need some efforts to instantiate or allocate.

In short. It's stupid to pass around "ids" in a program.

Comments

[sassa-nf.livejournal.com]

you will have trouble "identifying" equal but not identical objects. In the sense you want to be able to use both objects to refer to the same entity.

eg two strings "abc" and "abc" are equal but using a mere reference is wrong in most cases. (ie using a reference only makes sense in some memory management sort of context)

[juan-gandhi.livejournal.com]

That's a different level, no?

[sassa-nf.livejournal.com]

No, I think not. In the original problem if someone uses ids, it means they a. don't have a reference (address) to the object; b. in order to get a reference to the object when they need it, they use the id, so there is some search.

I reckon it is not the case of being lazy and saving the id instead of a reference. It may be the case that the id can be constructed, but the whole object needs to be found. You could even view it as a constructor (global static map or factory): given A, return B. A is id, B is the object. You say keep a reference to B. I say, is it really that different from constructing it using A, especially if A is isomorphic to B.

Eg error code is the same, error message is location-specific. Besides, the error message is constructed from a template, so you can't really look up translations using, say, a canonical string (in English).