On Aug 27, 2008, at 8:52 PM, Matthias Troyer wrote:
On 27 Aug 2008, at 15:29, Robert Ramey wrote:
Daryle Walker wrote:
I have an alternate suggestion: what about continued fractions? Turn the floating point value into a list of integers. This works no matter what f.p. systems the source and destination use. You just need a portable integer serialization format.
which we already have. [SNIP] I'm don't have enough time to review the suggestion in the detail it probably deserves. But a cursory look shows a lot of imagination.
It will just be horribly inefficient. A text representation will be faster and more compact.
But we're trying to avoid conversion rounding errors, which could happen even under text conversion. If you don't like continued fractions, then serialize the f.p. radix, the virtual numerator of the binary (or whatever) fraction (include any implicit leading 1 or whatever), and the power of the radix used for the virtual denominator. They're all integers, so feel free to use text if you want. -- Daryle Walker Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie darylew AT hotmail DOT com