In general the process of taking some convoluted internal data structure and generating a linear representation of it that can be used to reconstruct the internal data structures at a later time. This is the fundament underlying persistence and transfer of complex data over channels.

Examples on the wiki

   * [Serializing a Bitmap]
   * [Serializing a Photo]
   * [Serializing a Canvas widget]
   * [Serializing a Widget]
   * [Serializing a Text widget]
   * [A Widget Serializer]
   * [Deep copy and persistence of a BWidget's Tree] 
   * [Dumping interpreter state]: [proc]s, [global]s, [interp aliases], [package require]ments
   * [Serializing TclOO objects]

[RS] notes that most serialization worries from other languages are no problem in Tcl where [everything is a string] ...

Great that be doable, better that be done (where worries go). 

[TV] But in various cases it should be so much simpler... Agreed, though. - [RS]: This page lists only the nontrivial cases. Other languages will have to worry about how to serialize an integer, a double, a list, an array... which Tcl all provides with built-in string reps, as specially simple case of serialization.

''[escargo] 21 Feb 2004'' - This could also be seen as an implementation of the '''Memento''' design pattern.

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