Bob Kline wrote:
> I just ran into this behavior with an attempt to pickle a dom tree
> for an XML document whose nesting level never got deeper than nine
> child nodes, and indeed it crashed the interpreter.

Pickling recursive data-structure should not crash the interpreter.
Please open a new issue and don't forget to provide an example case.

> the documentation for the pickle module [1] which claims (summarizing)
> that serializing recursive objects using marshal will fail but
> pickling recursive objects will not fail.

The section of documentation, you are referring to, uses the term
"recursive object" to means an object which contains a reference to
itself. Anyway, the documentation [1] states clearly:

  Trying to pickle a highly recursive data structure may exceed the
  maximum recursion depth, a RuntimeError will be raised in this
  case. You can carefully raise this limit with sys.setrecursionlimit().

[1]: http://docs.python.org/lib/node317.html