Basic Serialization - a design decision question

[Steve Holden]

Gizmo wrote:
> Hello
> I am a relative newcomer to Python, and I am studying it to understand 
> its design. It intrigues me.
> I recently studied Serialization of classes via the pickle/cPickle 
> library, and I have a question.
> 
> Why is Serialization handled by a separate library (ie, pickle). Is it 
> possible, by design, to have serialization "internally" implemented via 
> an implicit ___serialize___ method? Ofcourse, you have to make this 
> method not overrideable (sp?). For example, the __repr__ method gives us 
> the string representation of a class... similarly, the __serialize__ 
> method would give us the "serial norm" representation of the class.
> 
> This would allow me to do something like this,
> conn.send(serial(myClass));  // or something like that?
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> 
> 
It would be quite possible to do this - it just hasn't been done, is 
all. I'm not quite sure what advantage you see for serial(myClass) over 
pickle.dumps(myClass) though.

regards
  Steve
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