A Structure Independent Method for Saving and Restoring Dynamically Allocated Data

Most modern high level programming languages support some type of structure or record construct. Programmers, in general, find it extremely useful (if not necessary) to make use of these constructs. That is, programmers think of the data that they will work with abstractly. These abstractions are then mapped into structure definitions, which in turn, are used by a compiler or interpreter lo produce a runable program. In many applications, these structures (data structures) are used internally by the program. The program creates data structures that are used only for the duration of the program's execution. After termination, the data contained in the data structures is discarded. However, there are applications in which the data must be saved. For example, a database management program must preserve the contents of the database upon termination of the program. Another execution of the program at a later time will make use of the preserved database. If such a database is represented by a complex data structure, it may be a non-trivial task to save the data in a file. What is described in this paper is a method of saving and restoring arbitrary data structures in a file. The method described is implemented "on top of" a language; but could be made part of the specification of a language