> By attribute do you mean an element of the data structure that is blessed > in the object? Or do you mean some sort of new attribute you would assign a > new Serializable data type (ala something to suggest for Perl 6).
I think that what Brian was trying to say is that you could mark an object attribute as being transient and Data::Dumper would ignore it. Maybe the way to do it would be to have a Serializable class that could have the following methods: freeze($self) : SCALAR thaw ($class) : OBJECT clone($self) : OBJECT; _freeze($self): SCALAR _remove_transient_attributes($self); The transient attributes names could be stored in @TRANSIENT. Maybe we could also have a more generic $TRANSIENT coderef as well. Whenever you want to serialize an object calling freeze, then the object is cloned and the clone gets its transient attributes removed. That we can call _freeze on the modified copy. With this interface it would be possible to subclass Serializable with Serializable::FreezeThaw, Serializable::DataDenter or Serializable::XMLDumper for instance (just override the _freeze and thaw methods). The objects can also redefine the clone() method if they need to. Now there's only one drawback that I can see - It needs to be written :-) Cheers, -- Jean-Michel Hiver.
