Stephen J Baker wrote:
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.
I am all for IEEE FP as well. Just as an ilustration, the code I am working on for custom layer modes uses fixed point - 32bit , being 16.16. There are reasons that lead me to choose it, I can comment if
it they are of interest to anyone.
If the internal image format is 32bit IEEE it will be easy for me
to add the needed convertions, as the 8 bit unsigned integer and 16 bit unsigned integer conversions are in place already.
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?
---- Steve Baker (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
