The Secret Sauce: What Gets Preserved

The truly remarkable thing about term-to-binary is that it preserves everything:

• Atoms remain atoms
• Numbers (integers, floats, bignums) maintain their precision
• Tuples preserve their structure and arity
• Lists (proper and improper) keep their shape
• Binaries get nested (yes, really—binaries within binaries)
• PIDs, ports, and references get special treatment in distributed contexts

The only things that don’t serialize well are:

1. Functions/lambdas: These are code, not data. You can’t serialize a function and expect it to work on another machine that doesn’t have that code.
2. Open file handles: These are OS resources and don’t travel well.
3. The improbability drive: This was never specified in the original ETF, a notable oversight.