Dict^H^H^H^HSomething in binary pickle causes exception

[Tim Peters]

[Greg Ewing]
> Sorry, it looks like I jumped to a completely unwarranted
> conclusion by assuming that dictionaries were responsible.

That's OK -- only Jim Fulton reads binary pickles for fun <wink>.

> There is *something* in my pickle that the unpickler
> doesn't like, however. It's a pickled Plex Lexicon,
> and it's rather big (too big to post here, anyway).
> I'll do some more investigation and try to narrow
> it down.

I seem to be dimly aware of several claimed pickle oddities backing up;
haven't had time to dig into them yet, and don't think anyone else has
either.  FWIW, note that pickles basically consist of instructions to a
"virtual pickle machine", and the implementation is recursive.  As a result,
pickles of very deeply nested structures can blow up.

> Anyway, what I mainly wanted to find out is whether
> the binary format *should* be able to handle everything
> that the non-binary format can. I take it the answer
> to that is "yes"?

That's the intent, yes.  I don't know of any exceptions or bugs in this
area, but you can deduce from an earlier statement that I don't read binary
pickles for fun.