RE: [boost] Re: Serialization (Persistence) library draft submission

From: Asger Alstrup Nielsen (alstrup_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-03-01 08:20:40

> 'describe' alone is clearly not enough. It is still usefull. 
> In Jens' code it 
> is possible to overload 'save'/'load' functions to do 
> whatever you like, but 
> they default implementation use 'describe'. I suspect that 
> for many classes 
> 'describe' will be sufficient, and I'd like to have it.

I agree that 'describe' is very important. I have been using XTL for a
long time, and XTL supports the 'describe' way. It works for 95% of all
cases, and in the remaining cases, you just overload it and get what you
want.

The 'describe' approach has many advantages over 'load'/'save' in those
95% of cases, and I would not use a serialization system that required
both 'load'/'save' always.

Notice that versioning falls naturally into the 'describe' approach, and
so does many other things that on the surface seem to require separate
'load'/'save' functions.

Greets,

Asger Alstrup Nielsen