Re: heterogeneous collections

[Mayan Moudgill]

Ugh?  I'm talking about serializing simple data types like int32 and int64
to/from strings.  I think you're getting carried away ;)

I'm assuming you're using sprintf/sscanf (or strtol/strtoll or their 
reenterant equivalents in whatever language you are using). Measure the 
overhead for converting a character string to an integer; you might be 
unpleasantly surprised about the overhead. It is non-trivial.