Re: serializing lua tables

[Klaus Ripke <paul-lua@...>]

On Monday 21 March 2005 15:32, Adam D. Moss wrote:
> Because the other end of the exchange might not be using
> Lua.  On the other hand, since the entirety of Lua is
> smaller to embed than most XML parsers, that's a poor
> excuse. ;)
absolutely!
Especially, because the other end might not be using XML
-- the XML version you require, that is.

XML interoperability is a pita sometimes and impossible other times.
(When you need different parser implementations to grok
different documents but the environment won't let you link
to multiple parsers).

In general, at least since the days of the OSI stack one can say
that a protocol which defines so much that it's never implemented
completely and next to correctly is not well defined in practice.

"Lua 5", on the other hand, is very well defined, and the actual
parsing code for whatever style of serialization could even be sent
along with the data :)