Serializable and transient

Question

To make a class serializable we do the following:

class A implements Serializable {
    transient Object a;
}

And not this:

Answer 1

So you're asking why you can't mark a class as not serializable (like a transient member)? Why wouldn't you just not mark class members of the not-to-serialize type as transient? Or use a serialization delegate for that class type when you do the serialization? It seems a little weird that you would want to tell Java to not do something at this level instead of telling it to do something.