[Rd] corruption of data with serialize(ascii=TRUE)

[Roger D. Peng]

I noticed the following peculiarity with `serialize()' when `ascii = TRUE' is 
used.  In today's (svn r37299) R-devel, I get

 > set.seed(10)
 > x <- rnorm(10)
 >
 > a <- serialize(x, con = NULL, ascii = TRUE)
 > b <- unserialize(a)
 >
 > identical(x, b)  ## FALSE
[1] FALSE
 > x - b
  [1] -3.469447e-18  2.775558e-17 -4.440892e-16  0.000000e+00  5.551115e-17
  [6] -5.551115e-17 -4.440892e-16  0.000000e+00  2.220446e-16 -5.551115e-17


I expected `x' and `b' to be identical, which is what I get when `ascii = FALSE':

 > a <- serialize(x, con = NULL, ascii = FALSE)
 > b <- unserialize(a)
 >
 > identical(x, b)  ## TRUE
[1] TRUE


The same phenomenon occurs with `.saveRDS(ascii = TRUE)',

 > .saveRDS(x, file = "asdf", ascii = TRUE)
 > d <- .readRDS("asdf")
 >
 > identical(x, d)  ## FALSE
[1] FALSE
 >

Has anyone noticed this before?  I didn't see anything in the docs for 
`serialize()' that would indicate this behavior should be expected.

I'm on Linux Fedora Core 4.

-roger
-- 
Roger D. Peng  |  http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/