Robert,

> The one serialization format that jumps to mind is CORBA.

As the resident CORBA advocate on E-Lang :-), I agree completely
that the CORBA CDR (Common Data Representation) specification is
a strong open and neutral starting point for data encoding and
serialization in CapTP.

> There are language serialization bindings for Java,
> Smalltallk, C, and C++ (and probably others).

...Ada, Python, Lisp, (informal) Ruby, Eiffel...

> Since CapTP is specific to the kind of system that E is
> building, it may not map to the CORBA concepts of BOA,
> IIOP or GIOP.

Its probably better that it doesn't. Based on my understanding
of the two architectures, I'm coming to believe that the CapTP
on VatTP is actually a much cleaner architecture than GIOP (of
which IIOP is a binding to TCP/IP as a transport). Artifacts
that are equivalent to the BOA and POA will probably be needed
for languages that don't directly support the eventual send and
capability concepts.

>    Be that as it may, the OMG serialization standard is
> useful in its own right.

I personally think that the relatively recent extensions for
ValueTypes (which allow CORBA to provide pass-by-value as well
as the original pass-by-reference objects) are particularly
important, since they also provide the semantic foundation for
translation to XML for cases where a webservices- or human-
readable format is needed.

-DMC

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