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Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/libpickle.tex')
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/libpickle.tex | 7 |
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/libpickle.tex b/Doc/libpickle.tex index 8dc29e4..92020a2 100644 --- a/Doc/libpickle.tex +++ b/Doc/libpickle.tex @@ -11,7 +11,9 @@ The \code{pickle} module implements a basic but powerful algorithm for ``pickling'' (a.k.a.\ serializing, marshalling or flattening) nearly -arbitrary Python objects. This is a more primitive notion than +arbitrary Python objects. This is the act of converting objects to a +stream of bytes (and back: ``unpickling''). +This is a more primitive notion than persistency --- although \code{pickle} reads and writes file objects, it does not handle the issue of naming persistent objects, nor the (even more complicated) area of concurrent access to persistent @@ -54,7 +56,8 @@ advantage of using printable \ASCII{} (and of some other characteristics of \code{pickle}'s representation) is that for debugging or recovery purposes it is possible for a human to read the pickled file with a standard text editor. (I could have gone a step further and used a -notation like S-expressions, but the parser would have been +notation like S-expressions, but the parser +(currently written in Python) would have been considerably more complicated and slower, and the files would probably have become much larger.) |