[Visionaries] Cross language serialization

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

YAML (www.yaml.org) is a quite good language for serialization. While looking in 
to that it occured to me that it should be possible to use YAML to serialize 
objects between languages.

Most languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, C#, Java, DG-Scheme) are pretty much the 
same in their data types. The scripting languages tend to have more flexible 
integers while the compiled ones usually stick to the C model but that's 
something that can be worked around.

YAML supports integers, floating points and strings natively but doesn't place 
any limit on the size of them. That means that a C# implementation of YAML must 
determine the correct data type.

YAML also supports arrays and hashes. It's reasonable to expect that all 
languages used in DotGNU support these too. So there's no problem here too.

Finally YAML allows you to create extra data types, for example a PerlRegex. 
While I'm not very keen on having too much extra data types this could solve 
potential problems.

Now to the serialization protocol. Here's some code in C# (I hope it's correct 
:-):

public class Foo
{
  public int bar;
  public Foo baz;
}
fred = new Foo();
fred.bar = 15;
fred.baz = new Foo();
fred.baz.bar = 10;

here's the YAML:
---
  !dotgnu/object:Foo
    bar: 15
    baz: !dotgnu/object:Foo
      bar: 10

and in Ruby a usage:
fred.bar + fred.baz.bar
=> 25

Get the picture?

To make the serialization work all non-common things can't be serialized using 
the language neutral serialization. This means no reflective stuff (classes), no 
functions (lambda), no intercalls, etc.

Greetings,

Peter