On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Melvin Smith wrote:
> At 04:38 PM 10/20/2003 -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> >The encoding methods for freezing (and corresponding decoding methods for
> >thawing) may be overridden to provide an alternate serialization format.
> >The only requirement of the serialziation format is that it starts with a
> >minimally valid piece of XML that encodes the format and version of the
> >serialized format. The rest of the serialization format need not be XML.
> >This is done because the format and version of the serialized data are
> >required in the stream, and making it XML incoveniences nobody and makes
> >the XML folks happy. It's good enough, and not up for discussion.
>
> Does that mean all encodings will start with the "standard" markup header:
>
> <xml version="1.0"?>
Each serialized data stream, yeah. Just once, and probably a few extra
characters in there, to make it legit XML.
Definitely not once per object, just once per stream--if you do:
freeze S3, P5
and P5 happens to have a PMC that points to your top level symbol table,
the string in S3 will be darned huge, and have the <XML foo=?> thing in
there exactly once. (Well, unless you've chosen an XML encoding, in which
case I expect you've just blown memory... :)
Dan
