Re: [boost] Serialization Draft Submission # 2

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-03-22 03:22:29

Beman Dawes wrote:
> At 03:30 AM 3/21/2002, Vladimir Prus wrote:
>  >I thought, however, that there should be some another level, which
> > manages translation between the objects into calls to low-level functions 
> > that store ints and chars. Now I see a problem: in order to make sense of 
> > XML,
>  >it should use reasonable names, and look like
>  ><green_crocodile>
>  >	<age>7</age>
>  >	<weight>200</weight>
>  ></green_crocodile>
>  >However, there's no was to get names "green_crocodile", "age" and
> > "weight" without user's help. So it's not possible to get reasonable XML
>  >automatically.
>
> While it might not be possible to do that "automatically", Jens' design
> made it trivial to supply a writer or reader that would handle
> "green_crocodile", "age" and "weight" XML. That should continue to be
> trivial, IMO, or a design really comes into question.

If "describe" methods don't tell the member names (and they don't now), 
you'll have no way to store those names. Should the ability to specify names 
be present? (In fact, this will make 'describe' support some form of 
reflection -- such a general usefullness of 'describe' is what makes me like 
it.) And 'describe' will have to also specify the class name.

- Volodya