>>Hi all,
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>>When discussing json data here, noticed that wikipedia and even Rick's class uses the word "serialize" as a function. Perhaps this is a term taught at university (I did not take computer science, rather crop science) so have not used it before. When I think of "serialize" I would think of a series of numbers or in publishing, to publish a series of articles that might in other cases have been a book etc.
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>>I looked at the wikipedia but the explanation still did not makes sense of why the word "serial" was used. It seems as though basically serializing means to transform an object into another type of data string easily transmitted to another computer system - or something like that.
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>>Just wondering...just don't like using terms without having a clue as to their root meeting.
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>I don't like using terms whose authors built them with disregard to what is the meaning of word they used. Serialize is, indeed, something that doesn't sound what it's doing; I understood the concept long before I accepted that this is the word to use for it. Because either json or xml or whatever you use are not turning the object's structure into a flat series of items - they are structured, there's containership. Flattening may be a better word, or perhaps betexting.
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>I rather suspect that Cetin might be right, because M$ is the champion of misnomers. They called the node in file system structure a directory, by analogy to a phone directory - except the latter only contains names, not actual telephones. Then they took the word folder after fighting it for a number of years, but that's also wrong - have you ever seen folders within folders ten levels deep? In real life this goes at best one level.
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>And the explorers... first they never said "internet explorer" - that's perhaps allowed for us or reporters to say, but coming from M$ it's always "Microsoft internet explorer" - not a misnomer this time, because it wasn't much use for regular internet, only for Microsoft internet (i.e. where sites run on Front Page and teem with ActiveXes). And the other two... I never managed to explore a single window or a file using those.

Of course we have the more common versions of the names like Microsoft NotWork, Internet Exploder, File Manger, etc.