property details

[mkobetic]

Jan and I had a discussion and he pointed out that the spec doesn't prescribe any ordering of properties in a ston file even though we both assumed alphabetically sorted. The sorting is important to avoid spurious changes due to random ordering. Can we add that requirement to the spec?

Also we discussed the topic of omitting empty properties. Currently STIG leaves them out, wheres STX does not. We may want tighten the spec in this regard as well. Can we say that empty properties SHOULD be omitted?

[dalehenrich]

Alphabetic ordering is important, so yes it should be added to spec.

I'm inclined to want to keep empty files around (I don't fee strongly here)...

To me the directory structure is reflecting an object structure and each file represents and instance variable in the object, so an empty file represents the existence of the slot ... without the empty slot we might be looking at a different object structure ...

BTW, where do the empty properties files show up?