Okay, this suggests I'm not confused; there's just no argument given. > Yeah, so you get a serialization format that's the same as your code. Big deal. There'

Okay, this suggests I'm not confused; there's just no argument given. > Yeah, so you get a serialization format that's the same as your code. Big deal. There's no reason this would be automatically a "good thing" -- a serialization format that is also valid source code -- it's just a thing. It's good to have a clean path from data structure to serialized data and back again; but if the obvious way to re-create the data structure (exec the code) has a huge security flaw built into it, that's no longer a clean path. Human-readable serialized formats are nice; but guidelines on "readable" for a data structure vs. "readable" for full-power source code are not the same -- and "compact" is also strongly good for serialization formats, but not nearly so important for source code.