[phobos] Interest in having a serializer in Phobos?

[Jacob]

On 8 aug 2010, at 21:35, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> On 08/08/2010 01:39 PM, Jacob wrote:
>> On 8 aug 2010, at 17:27, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Deserialize into Object and then cast the Object to Shape.
>> 
>> To be able to cast it to a Shape you need to know the type at compile
>> time when you deserialize it. Or you have to register a method that
>> deserializes the object, which is exactly how it works now when you
>> deserialize through a base class reference.
> 
> You only need to know the _base_ type statically.
> 
>>>> Or would Variant be useful here? I have not used Variant.
>>> 
>>> Probably Variant would play a role when e.g. one wants to
>>> deserialize "the next primitive type" without needing to know
>>> exactly what type that is (e.g. different integer widths).
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Andrei _______________________________________________ phobos
>>> mailing list phobos at puremagic.com
>>> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/phobos
>> 
>> I'm not sure if we understand each other correctly.
> 
> Most likely - sorry about that. Don't forget that all I'm going by is the tutorial, which is very brief.
> 
>> If you
>> deserialize into Object you eventually need to cast it to something
>> more useful and then you probably could have deserialized to that
>> type in the first place. The library can deserialize through base
>> class references (by register a deserialize method) but you would
>> have to start with a static type somewhere, not just Object. Do you
>> have a simple (code) example describing what you want to do?
> 
> I think the Shape example is simple enough to serve as a good baseline. Say you have a hierarchy rooted in Shape including e.g. Triangle, Circle, and Rectangle. Now say you have a drawing represented as a Shape[]. What steps do you need to take to save the drawing to disk and restore it later?
> 

The code example is now available at: http://dsource.org/projects/orange/wiki/Tutorials/SerializeBase

> Andrei
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