Do you, Programmer, take this Object to be part of the persistent state of your application, to have and to hold, through maintenance and iterations, fo

Do you, Programmer, take this Object to be part of the persistent state of your application, to have and to hold, through maintenance and iterations, for past and future versions, as long as the application shall live? Arturo Bejar, as quoted[1] in Mark Miller’s “Safe serialization under mutual suspicion”, which describes what it takes to make reasonable and compatible serialization restoring “all you can do is to send a message” objects. (The Smalltalk school actually spent quite a bit of time on the upgrade problem, see e.g. Fuel[2] and its references, but it was after the industry took the object orientation shiny and ran away with it, so that work seems to be little-known outside it.) [1] http://www.erights.org/data/serial/jhu-paper/upgrade.html http://www.erights.org/data/serial/jhu-paper/upgrade.html [2] http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6221 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6221