[Zope3-dev] renaming MementoBags..conclusions?

[Guido van Rossum]

> But does a memento-bag only hold meta-data?
> 
> I think it can be used to hold a lot more kinds of data besides 
> meta-data of the object it is associated with. In fact, I think it will 
> very rarely be used to hold meta-data of an object it is associated with.
> 
> Or, perhaps there's a less-strict use of the term meta-data that I'm not 
> aware of.
> 
>    http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=Metadata
> 
> I would not like to confuse the ideas of "associated with an object" and 
> "information about an object or its structure".
> 
> > (Jim and Guido both seemed to favor this to my proposal, IAssociatedData)
> 
> I prefer this spelling because to my ear it more accurately describes 
> the purpose of the thing.

Depends on the ear :-).  To me it's just more verbose.  Unless you
restrict the definiton of metadata to the Dublin Core, the concept of
metadata is vague enough that anything you'd want to be associated
with an object can be considered metadata.

What to call this is not a new issue, by the way.  MacOS calls it
"resources" (its "resource fork" is pretty similar to what's in the
memento bag).  AtheOS calls it "attributes".  I think both those terms
are too general.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)