Winter Madness - Passing Python objects as Strings

[Hendrik van Rooyen]

"Nigel Rantor" <wi... at wiggly.org> wrote:


> Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
> > "Nigel Rantor" <wi... at wiggly.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
> >>> If you have any interest, contact me and I will
> >>> send you the source.
> >> Maybe you could tell people what the point is...
> > 
> > Well its a long story, but you did ask...
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Maybe I should have said
> 
> "why should people care"
> 
> or
> 
> "why would someone use this"
> 
> or
> 
> "what problem does this solve"
> 
> Your explanation doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, I'm sure it
> does to you.
> 
> Why, for example, would someone use your system to pass objects between
> processes (I think this is the main thing you are providing?) rather
> than POSH or some other system?
> 

I can see that my explanation passes you by completely.

I said, in my original post, that a can could not leave a process.
A can is exactly the same as a C pointer, only its value has been
converted to a string, so that you can pass it "in band" as
part of a string. That is all it does. No more, no less.

Passing it to an outside process makes no sense, unless it points
at an object in shared memory - else it guarantees a segfault.

It is not something that would find common use - in fact, I have
never, until I started struggling with my current problem, ever even
considered the possibility of converting a pointer to a string and 
back to a pointer again, and I would be surprised if anybody else
on this list has done so in the past, in a context other than debugging.

Which is why I posted.  This is supposed to be a newsgroup,
and this is a rare occurrence, and hence news.

- Hendrik