[PD] [pool] question

[David Sabine]

Hello all - but specifically Thomas Grill,

I really like [pool] and I can foresee many great uses for this external.  I
have a question however as I'm trying to understand the object's
functionality.

In the documentation (pool.pd and elsewhere) you talk about "directories"
and such.  But when I send a "mkdir" message, a directory is NOT created on
my hard drive.  I'm assuming then that I'm misunderstanding the
nomenclature.  I've never used the [coll] object in Max.

Here's the question:
Pool is really managing "arrays" or "dictionary" objects right?  I mean KEY
+ VALUE pairs in the Visual Basic world are referred to as dictionaries.
Arrays are values organized by 'index' (or in this simile: 'keys' which can
be named).

So in another sense, Pool and it's ability to 'mkdir' etc. is simulating the
creation of database tables right?  Or perhaps another analogy might be
"recordsets"?  I'm grasping a little here, but even in this early version of
[pool] I can already understand ways that I can simulate columns and rows of
records and even store information in different 'directories' as you say
(which seem a lot to me like 'tables').

I understand that all the data is held in memory until such time as I want
to commit the data to a file on my drive via the "save" method.  When I do
this, it's sort of like saving the database tables in a .dat file right?

I realize that [pool] is merely in its first version (and is already
awesome!) but I wonder if there are plans in the future to:
a) allow the values to be returned by index (a la Visual Basic dictionaries)
in cases where we might not know the KEY name...but we now it's index.
b) allow control of a cursor (a la recordsets) so that operations like
"movenext" or "movefirst" might be used?

Regards,
Dave S

p.s.: I know I know I know...give me an inch and want a mile right!?
I suppose I'm just really excited about this object.  It's already useful in
a million ways.