title: Elisp: How to save data in a file?
body: <p>I want to save data to a file in my elisp program. I have a multi-dimensional list that I want to save to a file, so I can restore it the next time my program runs. What's the easiest / best way to do this?</p>
  
  <p>I realise, of course, that I can simply write my data to a buffer in a custom format and then save the buffer, but then I'd have to write a function to parse that data format when I want to restore it. I'd rather not have to do that.</p>
  
  <p>In Python, there's the Pickle module that lets you "dump" objects to disk and restore them, very easily. Is there something similar for elisp?</p>