[Python-Dev] Iterating over marshal/pickle

[Fredrik Lundh]

Tim Lesher wrote:

> 1. Does this seem like a reasonable addition to the standard library?

I cannot remember ever doing this, or seeing anyone except Perforce 
doing this, and it'll only save you a few lines of code every other year 
or so, so my answer is definitely no.

(if you're serious about P4 integration, you probably don't want to use 
Python's marshal.load to deal with the P4 output either; the marshalling 
code has had a tendency to crash Python when it sees malformed or pre-
maturely terminated output).

> Incidentally, I know that pickle is preferred over marshal, but some
> third-party tools (like the Perforce client) still use the marshal
> library for serialization, so I've included it in the discussion

Perforce is the only 3rd party component I'm aware of that uses a 
standard Python serialization format in this way.

As the x windows people have observed, the only thing worse than 
generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at
all..

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