> So you're consuming data of an existing (legacy) SOAP service? Or complying with existing clients of a (legacy) SOAP service? That's not the same as writing a

> So you're consuming data of an existing (legacy) SOAP service? Or complying with existing clients of a (legacy) SOAP service? That's not the same as writing a new SOAP service. Neither; we're accommodating large, complex systems that only have a few options for "send selected data elsewhere". "Web services" (meaning SOAP) tends to be on that list, plus often other options that are completely unacceptable like "FTP". > If the language you're using is already expressed in a form that does not need serialization, then you don't have to serialize it. This is the very essence of languages that are homoiconic. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with that before down-voting what I have to say about it. I'm someone who responded to you; I didn't downvote anything. I can try again: I use serialization all the time, to convert in-memory data structures into something I can send over a connection (or to disk, etc.), then to reconstitute them back into in-memory data structures on the other end. So I don't yet see how homoiconic languages play into serialization.