Mark objects with internal state

[samwaseda]

I was talking with Michael Crusoe today, and he told me that CWL recently introduced a way to mark inline editing for file systems, because they cannot always copy a full directory. In our case, it is crucial for Python or C++ objects, because copy is not always implemented and even if it were, the amount of data is so large that the user might not want to do it. So instead of insisting on making independent IO, I thought about including a flag. Maybe something like:

@meta(edits="input.structure")
def create_vacancy(structure):
    del structure[0]
    return structure

Once the workflow runs, maybe semantikon should make sure that this input structure is not stored in the knowledge graph. What do you think?

[liamhuber]

There's nothing prohibiting mutation nodes (nor, probably, ought there to be, and even if we wanted it it would be tough to enforce), so having a place to indicate mutating behaviour seems helpful to me.