"Beman Dawes" <bdawes@acm.org> wrote in message news:6.0.3.0.2.20041109120357.0258a188@mailhost.esva.net...
At 11:30 PM 11/8/2004, Robert Ramey wrote:
"Beman Dawes" <bdawes@acm.org> wrote in message news:6.0.3.0.2.20041108214926.02e42130@mailhost.esva.net...
The ability to serialize based on either the actual internal physical representation (for "just boost" libraries) or on a logical representation provided by member functions (for "std" libraries) is really cool,
perhaps, but I don't know that one can know that it will always be
IMO. possible
I guess it wouldn't be possible if there were important state information that is not directory exposed or reconstructible. But I'm not sure how common that is. Not very common in "std" libraries, I would guess.
It turned out I was able to implement serialization for all the stl containers depending upon only the public interface. This is similar to your case. The funny part is that it never occurred to me that this was key to portability. I wasn't able to do this with shared_ptr and its becoming apparent that its not going to be obvious on how to do it. Robert Ramey