[Python-Dev] Re: Re: Re: marshal / unmarshal

[Bob Ippolito]

On Apr 11, 2005, at 12:33 AM, Fredrik Lundh wrote:

> Tim Peters wrote:
>> [Fredrik Lundh]
>>> is changing the marshal format really the right thing to do at this
>>> point?
>>
>> I don't see anything special about "this point" -- it's just sometime
>> between 2.4.1 and 2.5a0.  What do you have in mind?
>
> I was under the impression that the marshal format has been stable for
> quite a long time (people are using it for various RPC protocols, among
> other things).  I might be wrong.

The documentation for marshal explicitly states that you should not use 
it for such purposes.

There's also a version argument to dumps and dump (though the argument 
list in the dump documentation doesn't say so), where version 0 is 
pre-2.4, and version 1 is 2.4+.  I don't think it's out of the question 
to add a version 2 for 2.5+ that uses a better serialization for floats 
(and it should probably add set/frozenset too since those are builtins 
now).

-bob