Yes. Currently, the options we have for stateful data are file I/O, which doesn't work perfectly, or tables that can lose their state if the file they're in gets reloaded. I'm suggesting something like Redis or APC, but implemented in Arc at the language level, to separate that state from the source code.
I was also thinking (in vague, "sketch on the back of a coffee-stained napkin" detail) that it could also be used to flag variables for mutability and for namespacing. In that if you added "x" from foo.arc it would automatically be namespaced by filename and accessible elsewhere as "foo!x",so it wouldn't conflict with "x" in bar.arc.
>Otherwise hitching the code to a third-party db, as a requirement, would really limit what could be done with the language and would create all kinds of problems.
Yeah, but to be fair, Arc is already hitched to Racket, which appears to support SQL and SQLite, so maybe third party wrappers for that wouldn't be a bad idea as well... sometime in the future when things are organized enough that we can have a robust third party ecosystem.
> Arc is already hitched to Racket, which appears to support SQL and SQLite...
Well racket supports SQL and SQL lite as an option, but racket can also run on platforms that don't support them so it's not 'hitched'. i.e. compiling to run on micro-controllers, mobile devices etc.