We are having a game of 'semantic football' in the office over this matter: I am writing a method for an object which will represent the object as a string. That string should be such that when typed (more likely, cut and pasted) into the interpreter window (I will keep the language name out of this for now), will produce an object which is, for our purposes, identical to the one upon which the method was called. There is a spirited discussion over the 'best' name for this method.

The terms pickle, serialize, deflate, etc have been proposed. However, it seems that those terms assume some process for the de-pickling (unserialization, etc) that is not necessarily the language interpreter itself. That is, they do not specifically refer to the case where strings of valid code are produced. This is closer to a quine, but we are re-producing the object not the code, so this is not quite right.

any suggestions?