[M3devel] Pickles, TextLiterals, and word size

[Rodney M. Bates]

On 07/24/2013 10:34 AM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 09:10:31AM -0500, Rodney M. Bates wrote:
>> There is what I would call a bug in TextLiteral.i3 whose effect is that a
>> TextLiteral.T has a different fingerprint on 32- and 64-bit machines.
>> So you can't pickle a Text literal on one word-sized machine and unpickle
>> it on the other.
>>
>> But fixing this will have the effect of invalidating any existing pickles
>> written on a 64-bit machine before the fix, so they can't be read after
>> the fix, even on a 64-bit machine.  They would have to be rewritten after
>> the fix.
>
> Ah!  The problems of long-term compatibility!
>
> Is there any way of looking at a a pickle and determining whether it
> comes from a 32- of 64- bit machine?

Yes, the pickle contains word size, LONGINT/LONGCARD size, floating
point representation, endianness, lazy alignment, maximum alignment,
record alignment, and now, widechar size, all for the system it was
written on.


>
> It there a way of special-casing the specific fingerprint that's about
> to be invalidated, so as to convert it properly on input only, while
> generating the new one on output?
>

Yes, I thought about this.  It would not be hard to find out what the
two fingerprints are and test one read from a pickle against these values.

But the problem is, there is an unbounded set of types that would depend
indirectly on this, and they can't all be accounted for.  Using, e.g.,
BITSIZE(INTEGER) as a bound in a range is the way this is happening
it the subject case.

Hmm, maybe I could just do the specific derived fingerprints for a
TextLiteral.T, and that would be good enough.  Let the programmer be
responsible for other types.  I think it would fix the immediate
problem without undermining anything existing.

I already have file dumps I can dig the values out of.  I'll look
into that.  Thanks!


>>
>> Is anybody doing the latter?  Would having to recreate your pickles be a
>> problem?  Apparently, nobody is going cross-word-size, or we'd have heard
>> about it.
>>
>> I would like to fix it properly, but don't want to undermine anybody's
>> working system.
>>
>