"M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com>:
Perhaps pickle could grow an option to assume that a data structure is non-recursive ?
Then you'd probably want some means of detecting cycles, or you'd get infinite recursion when you got it wrong. That would mean keeping a stack of objects, I think -- probably less memory than keeping all of them at once. But I think the idea of keeping the object references in a list is well worth trying first. 4 bytes per object instead of 36 sounds like a good improvement to me! Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+