Introduction

Originally Eiffel Software's object serialization was written in C and was proposing the following alternative:

• basic: the same version of the executable on a particular platform can store and retrieve objects.
• general: different versions of the executable on a particular platform can store and retrieve objects.
• independent: different versions of the ex

I'm not sure if this feature was noticed by many so I figured out I would write an entry on the matter. Starting with 6.5 we have added the notion of transient attribute to our runtime. Transient attributes are not stored to disk and thus their absence in the storable file means that they can safely be ignored upon retrieval.

It can be useful in many scenarios.