Talk:Serialization

Should a separate page be needed for the PostScript binary object format? --Zzo38 (talk) 22:24, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Possibly... I know there hasn't been all that much consistency in how the decisions of what gets separate pages and what gets lumped together into one page get made, but probably if there's going to be extensive description that's specific to one of the variants it deserves its own page. Dan Tobias (talk) 23:39, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

What is PostScript binary object format? -Jsummers (talk) 22:59, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

PostScript binary object format is a data format which is written out by the PostScript "printobject" and "writeobject" operators, and can be interpreted as a PostScript token (so it can be executed like other PostScript codes), and stores structured data which can contain lists, strings (of 8-bit characters), 32-bit integers, 32-bit floating point, names (which are like strings), and nulls. (Unfortunately there are no dictionaries, although Ghostscript supports dictionaries in PostScript binary object format as a nonstandard extension.) Like JavaScript has JSON and PHP has its own serialize format, PostScript has this format. It can be used in other programming languages too; I wrote a set of C macros (these macros are included in TeXnicard) for parsing PostScript binary object format. --Zzo38 (talk) 18:51, 7 March 2020 (UTC)