On Friday, August 2, 2019 at 2:47:04 AM UTC-7, E. Madison Bray wrote: > > As I have written before, pickle is not an appropriate format for > long-term stable serialization, and never has been, as it is > inherently tied to the code which produced it (and is highly > Python-specific, at that). If this is an endemic problem for someone, > they should use a different serialization format. > > If one reads the documentation of "pickle" in python then one does get the idea that it is designed to provide serialization that should also work over longer time stretches. It would take a lot of discipline to do the versioning correctly and one shouldn't start supporting pickling on new data structures too soon (it could lead to horribly expensive legacy support when one changes the way data is stored). It's certainly the kind of serialization format one comes up with for storing complicated data structures such as those in computer algebra. In principle, the discipline can be helped a lot by having a pickle jar that provides good coverage of (legacy) pickles. I agree that it's very ambitious to try and support pickling across sage, across time, and with the loose feature management and high diversity in developer interests it may well be unachievable/unmaintainable. But I think this is more a problem with the task, not with the pickle format.
I agree that for data storage that really needs to be able to stand the test of time, one needs to go with something human readable/copy-pastable. It's still open for misinterpretation, but at least one stands a chance of decoding it when the original tools have disappeared. In reality, the important thing is to properly document how the data was generated in the first place. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/7f2108c9-35a3-475f-996d-e8835dcabc10%40googlegroups.com.
