Austin Donnelly wrote:
How is the serialization done then, just a raw 32-bit IEEE float
dump with a predefined endianness? 64-bit doubles just as easy?
The real problem comes when your code is running on a system without IEEE
float support, and you need to manually convert from IEEE float to your
local weird-ass machine float. Not common, I grant you, but a real pain
when it bites.
So it's somehow preferable to come up with our own wierd-ass float format
and make life equally hard for everyone?
By far the vast proportion of modern machines have IEEE float - so let's
make life easy for the majority. The minority need a conversion routine
no matter what we do. The last machine I used that didn't have IEEE float
(some wierd Hitachi microcontroller) had convenient library functions to
interconvert between it's native format and IEEE.
The only other alternative is to use a storage mechanism for which there
is universal conversion support - but the only format that fits that
bill is ASCII - surely we aren't contemplating that for bulk image data?
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