Language question -- file = variable ?

[Bill Heagy]

William Park wrote:
> Well, not really weird.  Just trying to recycle old solution. :-)
>
> Current hype about Facebook's Cassandra and Google's BigTable got me interested.  They are just "sparse matrix", or "key-value" where "key" is multi-dimension.  Familiar spreadsheet is a 2D version.  I'm interested in how, in the past, data moved within a spreadsheet and between spreadsheets.  Of course, you can enter "macro formula" into a cell.  But, what if that formula is stored in a file, like a script?  Taking one step more, what if all cells are broken into files?  Then, you'd have something that's older than SQL.  It's so old that it's new again...
>
>
> I have no idea how Facebook/Google implement theirs behind the scene.  Probably, SQL database for indexing and transaction control, even though they say it's "NoSQL".
>

To get back to the original question, how about memory-mapped files - as 
in "mmap (2)"?

-- 
Bill Heagy
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