Reserving/Preallocating associative array?

[Gordon]

On Friday, 27 December 2013 at 17:26:42 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
> Also, gordon whats is keeping you from converting the textual 
> representation to a binary one? I mean, if you need to read 
> that file in often, you can easly preprocess it into a binary 
> blob. You could even modify my hashmap implementation to 
> support binary serialization, by just writing the entire array 
> to a binary file and loading it again.
> That would be fast...

This is intended to be a general-purpose CLI program to handle 
certain text files (from other sources), not a in-house 
application where I can restructure my data.

Text files are still the most ubiquitous way to share data 
(especially without limiting the languages/tools other will use 
to process them).

But out of curiosity - how would you serialize it?