I think you should think bigger. Howabout compressing the whole stream in a general way. Why not encrypt it while you're at it. Oh and avoid wrtting code altogether. I bet you think I'm being sarcastic. Well, I'm not - I'm serious. I would investigate using the serialization library along with binary (or maybe text as an experiment), in combination of io streams library. Serialization should work with ANY stream. And the io streams library includes zlib compression. (I don't know about encryption). So in theory, you should be able to get your data stream shrunk by 50% and free encryption - without writting any code at all. My 2 cents.
A) Do you think this is a reasonable addition/modification to the serialization library?
Not in my opinion. However it might be a good idea for an "archive adaptor" which enhances the behavior of another archive.
B) Is there any way to add this functionality to the serialization library without breaking existing archives? I see a call to get_library_version in the code, but I'm not sure what is the purpose of this statement.
The library includes class versioning. For those classes which didnt' include versioning, there is library version which is used for the same purpose.
Anyone?
Robert Ramey