abstract. the social and economic importance of large bodies of
programs and data that are potentially long-lived has attracted
much attention in the commercial and research communities. here
we concentrate on a set of methodologies and technologies called
persistent programming. in particular we review programming
language support for the concept of orthogonal persistence, a
technique for the uniform treatment of objects irrespective of their
types or longevity. while research in persistent programming has
become unfashionable, we show how the concept is beginning to
appear as a major component of modern systems. we relate these
attempts to the original principles of orthogonal persistence and
give a few hints about how the concept may be utilised in the
future.