the Reader. The output of "print" is human readable; it uses lists demarked by parentheses, for example: . In many types of Lisp, including Common Lisp, the printer cannot represent every type of data because it is not clear how to do so. In Common Lisp for example the printer cannot print CLOS objects. Instead the programmer may write a method on the generic function print-object, this will be invoked when the object is printed. This is somewhat similar to the method used in Ruby. Lisp code itself is written in the syntax of the reader, called read syntax. Most languages use separate and different parsers to deal with code and data, Lisp only uses one. A file containing lisp code may be read into memory as a data structure, transformed by another program, then possibly executed or written out, such as in a read–eval–print loop. Not all readers/writers support cyclic, recursive or shared structures. .NET Framework .NET Framework has several serializers designed by Microsoft. There are also many serializers by third parties. More than a dozen serializers are discussed and tested here. and here OCaml OCaml's standard library provides marshalling through the Marshal module and the Pervasives functions output_value and input_value. While OCaml programming is statically type-checked, uses of the Marshal module may break type guarantees, as there is no way to check whether an unmarshalled stream represents objects of the expected type. In OCaml it is difficult to marshal a function or a data structure which contains a function (e.g. an object which contains a method), because executable code in functions cannot be transmitted across different programs. (There is a flag to marshal the code position of a function but it can only be unmarshalled in exactly the same program). The standard marshalling functions can preserve sharing and handle cyclic data, which can be configured by a flag. Perl Several Perl modules available from CPAN provide serialization mechanisms, including Storable , JSON::XS and FreezeThaw. Storable includes functions to serialize and deserialize Perl data structures to and from files or Perl scalars. In addition to serializing directly to files, Storable includes the freeze function to return a serialized copy of the data packed into a scalar, and thaw to deserialize such a scalar. This is useful for sending a complex data structure over a network socket or storing it in a database. When serializing structures with Storable, there are