Peter Dimov wrote:
Robert Ramey wrote:
Peter Dimov wrote:
When the author of X that has two fields x and y wants to serialize it into _any_ archive, he just "says" save(x) and save(y) to the archive.
However, the author of Y that contains an array currently can't just say save_array(a) to the archive, because save_array is not part of the current vocabulary. He needs to say save(a[0]), save(a[1]), ..., save(a[n-1]).
he needs to say save(a) that is ar << a. In any of the proposals the correct override will be invoked.
This only works for C-style arrays with the size fixed at compile time. Think about how one would write "save" for the following:
OK that's how I interpreted the [] brackets. Having thought about this a little more - and knowing I faced this issue before I remembered the concept of "serialization wrapper" as documented in the manual. ( I see now that the explanation is slightly out of whack - but I'll address that later.) This is used to implement name-value pairs. The implementation is such that those archives that don't use them don't have to have them included in the archive header. Those that do can take advantage of them. Looking back - I now remember I invented the "serialization wrapper to address exactly this situation" To summarize The basic idea is to define something