Re: string serialization of builtin datatypes

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 19:47:04 +0200, Andreas Weber wrote:
> Dear users,
>
> I once wrote a serialize function
> (https://github.com/octave-de/serialize) to get a human readable string
> representation of built in datatypes. To restore the var just call eval.
> The intended purpose is to serialize objects for transmission over
> byte-stream channels (serial, tcp...) or for storage in databases while
> perserve the readability by humans(in contrast to the usage of
> typecast(x, "uint8" for example).
>
> Does anyone see an octave-forge package this might fit in?
>
> btw: Do we have a function which checks a string for malicious code
> before evaluating? For example wget, system, unlink and so on.
>
> Any feedback and suggestions highly appreciated.

So basically an Octave equivalent of Python's repr()? I think I missed
this when you announced it before, but this is awesome!

I actually think such a function would be incredibly useful to be a
standard feature of Octave itself.

If it was a function in core Octave that worked with all builtin
types, it could also be overridden for classes and user-defined types
and become ever more useful to everyone without having to depend on an
external package or library.

I think that once there was a question or discussion about having a
display mode option to enable this for display of objects in the
interpreter also, e.g.

  >> x = [1 2; 3 4]
  x =
     1   2
     3   4
  >> format literal_representation
  >> x
  x = [1 2; 3 4]

or something like that. There seems to be some convergence there with
what you have created.

-- 
mike