The *(term) for encoding _(high-level) data-structures so they fit the sequence-of-bytes (or sequence-of-words) paradigm used in _(low-level) message-passing paradigms.

Marshalling is particularly problematic when running programs and/or closures (i.e. programs together with they internal data) are to be communicated. It's typically something that you needn't care about when you have _(orthogonal persistence) and a _(distributed) system, but that programmers spend more than 70% of their time doing because they use low-level _(operating system)s.
