Serialization 0.0 README

Copyright (c) 2003 Gwydion Dylan Maintainers.

Rob Myers 2003 rob@robmyers.org


This is the start of a simple pure-Dylan portable serialisation library. I don't
have time to finish it now, but I'm making the code public in case anybody 
would like to see how such a thing might be approached.

It doesn't use any runtime internals, so the user haas to implement serialisers
for each class they write. This is very simple to do, and a "define serializable
class" macro could be written to make it automatic. Arbitrarily complex and
cyclic graphs can in theory be processed.

The code provided can write objects to a NeXT/Apple-style object format,
the library has been designed to make writing an XML format simple. A 'Meta'
parser could be used to complete this version or, the Gwydion xml library used
to implement xml reading/writing.


- Rob.