Jeff Garland wrote:

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Robert Ramey wrote: So I'm skeptical of trying to adjust to "old" proprietary formats with the serialization library.

Well, I believe you are taking too narrow a view here.

OK, I'll expand my horizon a bit. I can see how one might want to make special purpose archive which only handles a subset of all possible C++ structures. So it really comes down to evaluating the specific situation. There is nothing in the serialization library which conflicts with such usage so I'm happy to remain agnostic ( though still perhaps wary ) on this case. I wonder what happens when we need "special" information in the archive. I faced the same problem with XML where we need the name of the instance variable. I solved it by making the NVP wrapper which has worked well. However it does introduce a coupling between the archive and the serialization which I had strived to avoid. The best I could do was to make it optional and transparent to those archives which didn't use it. In order to do this I had to make all archive classes aware of it. Well, for XML this might be justified but in general I would find it objectionable. When one makes the archive dependent upon the serialization (E.G. by addressing only a subset of all C++), he won't be able to run the torture test suite. Personally, I consider this a significant liability. So anyway, if it works for a specific problem, then of course I've got no concerns. If its proposed as addition to the library, I would like to see it be universal as the current ones are - if only for the reason that a new archive can be subjected to the torture test with very little effort. So to summarize, if one wants/needs to make special purpose archive which handles a subset of all types - no problem. But it probably would not be of interest outside of the particular application. Robert Ramey