From: Chris Morris <home@...>
Date: 2002-04-04T12:21:55+09:00
Subject: Marshalling and initialize

The current preliminary version of the XmlSerialization module I'm writing
deserializes a new instance by simply calling new w/o params, which then
requires a parameterless initialize method.

In a recent thread Harry Ohlsen devised a way with the list's help to work
around calling initialize at all. At first I was concerned about doing this,
it seemed Wrong to not call initialize, since that's expected behavior. But
Harry argued that in a deserialization case, it's superfluous and probably
redundant.

I then looked at the Marshal module, and with a quick test noticed it
doesn't call initialize when it deserializes a new instance.

Is there ever a case where a call to initialize during deserialization would
be a Good Thing, or is it generally expected that, like the Marshal module,
the class be instantiated without it?

Chris