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Postings from November 1999
* Raphael Manfredi <Raphael.Manfredi@st.com> wrote...
*
* To be sure I understand your point here, are you basically saying that
* all marshalling modules (Data::Dumper, FreezeThaw, Storable, others to
* come) actually conform to an abstract common serializaing interface?
*
* That is to say, in essence, that they all declare:
*
* package XXX;
* @ISA = qw(Serializer ...);
*
* where
*
* package Serializer;
*
* sub serialize { die "deferred" };
* sub deserialize { die "deferred" };
*
* and therefore imposes heirs to actually define those primitives?
*
* If you're saying this, then I doubt it will reasonably happen. That's why
* the glue in MLDBM is there, to try offer a consistent serializing interface,
* yet delegating the work to the actual serializing modules , understanding
* their respective interfaces and features.
*
* For instance, Storable supports store() and nstore() to deal with native
* and network-neutral physical representation. But Data::Dumper has no need
* for this, and its designer was free to superbly ignore the issue. Which he
* did.
I said what I did because I didn't see any reasonable way to extract the
work you did as part of MLDBM from MLDBM and use it elsewhere. Your point about
there being real differences in the interfaces that must be preserved is a
good one.
I would like to use it, but I'm lazy and don't want to work hard that
integrate it into into my module. Laziness can be a virtue because it can
make you want things done right so that less work needs to be done later
and having a consistent interface for the various Marshalling routines
seems right to me.
An alternative would be to extract your work from MLDBM into a module called
Serializer that MLDBM would then use. This would be a bunch of work for you
so I'm not terribly comfortable asking for it. On the other hand, it's really
the only way I'll end up supporting multiple Serializers in my module. It
would be fine with me if it were still distributed with MLDBM. Or not.
Thanks,
-Dave
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