Pickling a class instead of an instance

[Sebastien Boisgerault]

Hi,

It seems to me that it's not possible with the pickle module 
to serialize a class rather than an instance, as in

>> from pickle import *
>>
>> class C(object):
>>     "... doc ..."
>>     a = 1
>>
>> pickstr = dumps(C)

I mean, it does *something*, there is no error indeed, but 
from the string pickstr, I am unable to rebuild the class 
C in a brand new context (got a "you're really stupid, all 
you deserve is an AttributeError because you know there is
no attribute 'C' in the 'module' object" error).

Am I wrong ? Why would the "(new-style) classes are regular 
objects too" mantra not apply in this case ? Could we imagine
a patch to the pickle module to handle this kind of situation ?

SB