> I am not convinced of their utility when
> transporting data between environments. They make sense for serializing
> one's own object graph, but I am not convinced that they are better
> (only a bit more convenient) than using symbolic names for linkage.

Agreed, but we may need to find an encoding that has them anyway.

There are two schools of thought on this:

1. Find a sensible data format and make programs conform to it.

2. Find out what data programs already have and figure out an encoding
transport it faithfully.

Perhaps both have their place. Perhaps we can ignore #2 for now.