Hand[le|el](s) with Care
Back in the day, Mac programmers had to deal with what their tattered copies of Inside Macintosh called handles: doubly indirected pointers to data structures. Handles made memory management easier — the actual data structures can be created anywhere, and moved around, without software authors having to explicitly deal with garbage collection and other memory management issues. Good Mac programming involved always working on objects only through their handles (^^PictRect for example). Back to digital media: the progression {unique original to instance of clones, to pointer to — not originals — but architectures in flux, constantly being revisted and tweaked …