Editing Serialization (section)

===Prolog===
[[Prolog]]'s ''term'' structure, which is the only data structure of the language, can be serialized out through the built-in predicate <code>write_term/3</code> and serialized-in through the built-in predicates <code>read/1</code> and <code>read_term/2</code>. The resulting stream is uncompressed text (in some encoding determined by configuration of the target stream), with any free variables in the term represented by placeholder variable names. The predicate <code>write_term/3</code> is standardized in the [[Prolog#ISO Prolog|ISO Specification for Prolog]] (ISO/IEC 13211-1) on pages 59 ff. ("Writing a term, § 7.10.5"). Therefore it is expected that terms serialized-out by one implementation can be serialized-in by another without ambiguity or surprises. In practice, implementation-specific extensions (e.g. SWI-Prolog's dictionaries) may use non-standard term structures, so interoperability may break in edge cases. As examples, see the corresponding manual pages for SWI-Prolog,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=termrw|title="Term reading and writing"|website=www.swi-prolog.org}}</ref> SICStus Prolog,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://sicstus.sics.se/sicstus/docs/latest4/html/sicstus.html/mpg_002dref_002dwrite_005fterm.html#mpg_002dref_002dwrite_005fterm|title="write_term/[2,3]"|website=sicstus.sics.se}}</ref> GNU Prolog.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://gprolog.org/manual/html_node/gprolog038.html|title="Term input/output"|website=gprolog.org}}</ref> Whether and how serialized terms received over the network are checked against a specification (after deserialization from the character stream has happened) is left to the implementer. Prolog's built-in [[Prolog syntax and semantics#Definite clause grammars|Definite Clause Grammars]] can be applied at that stage.