Operational and Storage Formats

Hyperbole uses a terse format to store explicit buttons and a more meaningful one to show users and to manipulate during editing. The terse format consists solely of button attribute values whereas the edit format includes an attribute name with each attribute value. A button in edit format consists of a Lisp symbol together with its attribute list which holds the attribute names and values. In this way, buttons may be passed along from function to function simply by passing the symbol to which the button is attached. Most functions utilize the pre-defined hbut:current symbol by default to store and retrieve the last encountered button in edit format.

The ‘hbdata’ class handles the terse, stored format. The ‘hbut’, ‘ebut’, and ‘ibut’ classes work with the name/value format. This separation permits the wholesale replacement of the storage manager with another, with any interface changes hidden from any Hyperbole client programming.