From: skybuck2000@hotmail.com   
      
   Today I present to the world "Skybuck's Universal Data Structure".   
      
   This new invention describes how to use "Skybuck's Universal Code".   
      
   This new invention is ment to describe high level data structures which offers   
   the same kind of flexiblity as Skybuck's Universal Code but at a high level.   
      
   Take note that this document is only a "draft" and might need further work,   
   but it does describe the general idea.   
      
   The general idea for Skybuck's Universal Data Structure is to describe again   
   the data in terms of "interleaving". However this time the meta data is not a   
   terminator, but  a type field. Humans like describing data in terms of types.   
   This is crucial and    
   essential to give data meaning. A terminator for example is already a type.   
   Basically an escape code.    
      
   However it is undesireable to introduce escape codes into a universal data   
   structure or encoding. Thus instead of terminating and scanning, interleaving   
   is used. Scanning for a terminator or encoding terminators will become   
   problematic as it requires raw    
   binary data to be transformed to prevent wrong interpretation or missing   
   interpretation, such as a missing terminator.   
      
   Also the meta bit of 1 in Skybuck's Univeral Code can be considered a switch   
   statement, it indicates to the machine/reader that it is now switching to a   
   different field.   
      
   This combined insight is what led to the discovery/determination that a type   
   field should be introduced which performs functionalities:   
      
   1. Switch between "meta data" and "raw data".   
      
   2. Terminate data structures   
      
   3. Describe the contents of data structures.   
      
   Basically this leads to the following design:   
      
      
      
   To see why this could be a superior data structure we could take a look at   
   "Unicode".   
      
   In Unicode (not to be confused with Skybuck's Universal Code which is ment for   
   raw data description) all alphabets of the world are thrown together to create   
   one big mess of alphabet soup.   
      
   Why was this done ? To facilitate communication between computers ?   
      
   But could it not have been done different ? The russians complain the unicode   
   is twice as big for them because of inefficiency of encodement of their part   
   of    
   the alphabet and that is a valid objection against unicode.   
      
   In the past there were codepages which described the alphabet soup in a more   
   efficient way.   
      
   Perhaps the problem back then was the lack of software to universally describe   
   these code pages and to embed them into a universal data structure.   
      
   Now with this new invention and insight in hind sight the unicode could have   
   been designed as follows:   
      
      
      
   and so forth. However the necessary software and hardware to facilitate this   
   switching between types was not present.   
      
   Now back to Skybuck's Universal Data structure, one of the immediate desires   
   is to create a list of available free memory for further segmentation and   
   allocation and use for data structures and data fields and such.   
      
   Immediately the design of Windows Operating System comes to mind where lists   
   of pages are describes to segment and describe the available memory pages and   
   such.   
      
   So for operating system design it is essential to be able to describe a list   
   of some sort.   
      
   Here is where it does become a bit fuzzy and it might require further work.   
      
   One possible idea is to describe a "Universal Type" like "Unicode".   
      
   Where data structures are described by a number.   
      
   Type 0 would be raw binary data, basically unknown data.   
   Type 1 would be the start of a list of universal data structures   
   Type 2 would be the end of a list of universal data structures.   
   Type 3 would be the start of a list of same type data. "efficient list"   
   Type 4 would be the end of a list of same type data. "efficient list"   
      
   Example of a generic list:   
      
      
      
   Example of a efficient list:   
      
      
      
   These types could be collected and described in "Universal Types" like unicode.   
      
   Bye for now,   
     Skybuck.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)