∞DL Superstructures use Nested Archetypical Formats
A unique feature of ∞DL is its support for data structures based on nested archetypical formats.
Instances of each of ARRAY, TABLE, NETWORK, TREE, and SPARSE_VALUES DataItems may serve as an
outer layer of a compound superstructure in which atomic addressable data points contain references
to nested DataItems.
Imagine this: network of trees, table of networks, N-dimensional array of tables… Well, how about
trees sparsely scattered in a 5-dimensional world with tables hanging from the trees, each table
packed with 3D arrays representing movies? Note that despite the exceeding complexity of these data
structures, they remain quite accessible due to the intuitive nature of the archetypes.
Nested Superstructures are supported by the same serialization mechanism as flat data objects,
and are built on a linear sequence of DataItems. Nested superstructures can be wholly contained
in a single DataObject, and the “sealing” mechanism applied recursively to the nested DataItems
will ensure incorruptibility of the entire Superstructure.
Nested structures are discovered by inspecting the attributes of higher-level DataItems and recursive
traversal of the Superstructure until all the elementary DataItems are visited. There are no explicit
limits on the complexity of the Superstructures, other than the human comprehension.