Node:Articles, Next:Conferences, Up:Concepts
An article is represented as a value of the type Text-Stat and a
string containing the article contents. An article will usually have one
or more recipients and may be a comment or footnote to other articles.
Each article is kept in the database until it is older than the
nice value of each of its recipients and it is not marked by any
user.
There is an array of Misc-Info included in the
Text-Stat. This array contains information about recipients,
senders, comments and footnotes.
Each article is identified by a number, the global1
article number (the Text-No). Global numbers are assigned in
ascending order to new articles, and are never reused. If an article
has recipients it will also have a local number for each recipient
(the Local-Text-No). Local numbers are used in some data
structures to provide more compact storage and to provide an ordering
of articles for a particular recipient. Local numbers are assigned in
ascending order and are never reused for a particular recipient,
though different recipients will have articles with the same local
numbers.
Occasionally it is necessary to map between local and global numbers.
The server call local-to-global
does this.