Hi Sarah,

Replying to a message of Sarah Nunez to David Noon:

 SN> Hi, David!  Haven't seen you post in a while, so hope you haven't had
 SN> a relapse of whatever was ailing you last autumn.

No, I have been away from Fido due to an outbreak of hardware problems (on
my gateway server, so I've been off the 'net too), Australian lawyers and
British tax returns (local equivalent of IRS-1040).

 SN> Out of sheer frustration with the currently available offerings, I'm
 SN> contemplating writing my own genealogy program.

Ok, although I believe there are some around for OS/2.

 SN> The various genealogy programs exchange genealogical information by
 SN> importing/exporting data in GEDCOM format.  I propose to begin with
 SN> the GEDCOM standard, and use its data structure as the basis for my
 SN> program.  The program would act on the data to enable the user to
 SN> add, edit, delete, link family members, etc., as well as print
 SN> various reports and import/export GEDCOMs from/to others.

Is this standard available to read anywhere?

 SN> Is this what is meant by Object Oriented Design and Programming?

Not really, unless the GEDCOM standard is based on "persistent
objects". This approach is quite rare for file standards, as it is
usually non-portable (i.e. the persistent copies of the data objects nearly
always reflect the implementation details of the program that processes the
file). The most well known "persistent objects" file standard is
that for Borland's Delphi development system, and it cannot be ported
readily away from Delphi.

It sounds to me like it is approaching a hierarchical database. After all,
genealogy data are intrinsically hierarchical. Since all the records in the
database or file will likely have identical structure, they would all be
mapped by the same object class in an OO program to process the data.

Processing such a file would be a good candidate for OOP, as you could have
methods for reading and writing the data in your local format, as well as
exporting or importing in GEDCOM format, all associated with the class that
maps the data in the manner most convenient to your program's execution.

Regards

Dave


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