Basic Serialization - a design decision question

[Gizmo]

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?
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