[Pipet Devel] PAOS and the Work Flow System

[Konrad Hinsen]

> > module plus some optimizations. The pickle module lets you serialize
> > Python objects into strings so you can send them over the net. There is no
> > specified standard for the pickle protocol.
> 
> I think we need to be careful, we should write our own pickling
> routines that serialize data as XML. From what I understand of
> pickling, this shouldn't be a problem, but I want to make clear that
> ad-hoc protocols are not going to be fun.

It's not as bad as it seems. The pickle protocol is in a sense documented
by Python's pickle module (which is very readable), and it is not going
to change (pickle files are used for archiving data in many applications).

Pickle data has the advantage of being compact and efficient, but also
the disadvantages of being neither "human reader friendly" nor easy to
process in other languages (because it is basically a text
representation of Python's internal data structures).

Which raises a problem: writing a pickler using another format is not
difficult, as long as the simple relation between the data layout
and Python's internal data structure remains. This however may not
be desirable, and then writing a general pickler (which can deal with
any kind of object) is probably not so easy.

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
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