The IRON data interchange format specifies a representation for semantic atoms such as numbers and characters as well as colection classes to bind them together. It is the type system of CHROME; since IRON is the data model of an ARGON system, CHROME is defined in terms of it.

An IRON object, when serialised, is referred to as "an ion"; the process of serialisation is "ionisation" and the opposite process "deionisation". I apologise in full for the abuse of scientific terms, but they're really handy :-)

There will be several different encodings of a given IRON value; an efficient and easily processed binary stream format for interchange and storage, and a textual format for debugging and manual editing - not to mention a random-access in-memory form.

See my current design for the basic model and written syntax.