[Python-Dev] new features for 2.3?

[Neil Schemenauer]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> For untrusted situations, you should design a custom format that
> OBVIOUSLY cannot be used to hack into your system.  XML sounds pretty
> good.

Ugh.  XML is way to verbose and is slow to parse, IMHO.  A limited
subset of the pickle or marshal format would be pretty good.

> No, for the same reasons as above.  I don't think you can prove
> [pickle is] safe, so I don't think you should trust it.

What about a subset that only included int, float, string, unicode,
dict, and tuple?

> Making marshal safe would be much easier, as long as you don't use
> eval, exec or new.function() on the result.

The documentation for marshal says "details of the format are
undocumented on purpose; it may change between Python versions".  Maybe
we need something like marshal that works on a limited set of types and
has a stable format.

  Neil