
On Thu, Mar 06, 2008, Greg Ewing wrote:
BTW, I only consider pickle suitable for quick and dirty uses anyway, because it ties the external representation very closely to internal details of your program, which can make it difficult to evolve the program without invalidating previously written files.
For long-term use, it's better to invest time in a properly-thought-out external format for the task, designed with extensibility in mind.
Maybe so, but my company has been using pickle as a primary long-term storage mechanism for more than a decade. We only rarely have problems with code changes causing pickle problems (less than once per year). OTOH, we mostly only have a growing internal format -- we almost never change the internal format. -- Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." --Butler Lampson