However, I don’t yet see why generating a semantics for normal CODE refs would be so difficult.

It's probably easier to start from the other side. With the things that Storable can handle such as, say, a HASH or ARRAY reference it is simple to dereference those things in order to determine the actual value of this things - this can be of varying degrees of difficulty depending on how nested the structured might be, but it is simple to see that given a HASH reference in $foo we can determine the structure of that object and obtain the values of the data therein - this can then be easily represented in serialization in such a way that the same data structure can be recreated on deserialization.

However, given a CODE reference the action of dereferencing does not give us information that would allow us to recreate the original subroutine: it performs the action that the subroutine was designed to do - this clearly cannot be represented in some datastructure by Storable.

Update: That said you might be interested to see This post in p5p

/J\

In reply to Re: Serializing CODE References by gellyfish
in thread Serializing CODE References by djantzen

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