[om-list] pattern conversions

[Luke Call]

I may be out of line here due to my lack of knowledge of what 
thoughtform's software does, but it also seems to me that if you have to 
change many utilities each time a file format changes, you haven't 
abstracted well or organized the code properly. In OO, only one class 
should care about how the file is formatted, and all others should 
read/write via that class. Then if the file format changes, hopefully 
the api of this class can stay relatively static but its internals 
change, and other classes just keep on using the same api as before. To 
create such abstractions and organize code, Craig Larman's book on UML 
and Patterns (I forget the exact title) is one useful reference but 
there are many others. The concept however is independent of UML or 
patterns--he just happens to explain things like that there (if I 
remember right).

Forgive me if I am way off due to misunderstanding here....
Luke