n C++ or Python.</li>
  <li>You can invent an ad-hoc way to encode the data items into a single string – such as encoding 4 ints as “12:3:-23:67”. This is a simple and flexible approach, although it does require writing one-off encoding and parsing code, and the parsing imposes a small run-time cost. This works best for encoding very simple data.</li>
  <li>Serialize the data to XML. This approach can be very attractive since XML is (sort of) human readable and there are binding libraries for lots of 