The "Entrelacs project" is a SylvainGarden's toy project dealing with a somewhat revolutionary computing environment, namely the EntrelacsSystem.
The main characteristic of the Entrelacs system is to represent knowledge through entrelacs, that is well-formed graphs of arrows.
This strategic choice leads to interesting properties.
| property | explanation |
| homoiconicity | Entrelacs are made from just one kind of building block: the arrow. |
| pure relationism | Entrelacs always represent knowledge as relations and only relations. |
| scale invariance | Entrelacs always represent knowledge in the same way whatever the data size and complexity. |
| introspectability | The system may access every aspect of its hosted knowledge. |
| fine-grained | Entrelacs feature the finest possible granularity for structured information storage. Within an EntrelacsSystem, the "arrow" replaces the "bit" as the basic unit of information. |
| redundancy free | Each piece of information is stored only once in the whole system. The storage space is redundancy free. |
| auto-indexation | Each piece of information indexes all the connected information within the system. |
| orthogonal persistence | Entrelacs make incremental & orthogonal persistence simple. |
| persistent data structures | Entrelacs make persistent data structure design simple. |
| garbage collection | Entrelacs make garbage collection simple. |
| memoization | Entrelacs make memoization simple. |
The EntrelacsSystem stores all the system's knowledge into entrelacs, whatever the scale of complexity or abstraction: from a single boolean state to a full featured office suite, from a meta-model framework to some "hello world" code. This knowledge representation strategy features high granularity, low redundancy and high speed access for a maximal expressiveness. As an example, any piece information can be used in an upper context as either a thing to be "tagged" or a "tag". Resulting tagged-to-tag relations can be abstracted in turn. This way of looking at data representation allows Entrelacs to encompasse existing systems like "tagsonomies",hierarchies or relational data bases.
Some related concepts and technologies
- The ArrowParadigm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_(computer_science)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_persistence
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_invariance
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization
Some opposed concepts and technologies
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_database
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigational_Database
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
The EntrelacsSystem should be able to replace software middle layers like interpreters, data base managers, file systems, run-time frameworks, and such. It may even evolve as an autonomous operating system on top of a dedicated hardware. For now, the current prototype is designed as a network (HTTP based) software server on top of a GNU/Linux OS. For a better introduction of the project technical aspects, see DesignIntroduction.
