Robert Ramey wrote:
Johan Råde wrote:
1 is inefficient when moving data between little-endian platforms 2 is inefficient when moving data between big-endian platforms So 3 should be most efficient. Is there an easy way of storing an endianness-flag in an archive?
The version currently in the package does that now for integer types.
Note, you could store floating points as a pair of integers using the facilties already in portable binary archive. This would have the side benefit of making the archives signifcantly smaller.
Robert Ramey
Great. Then you can handle float and double by just saving and loading the bytes, and deal with endianness the same way as for integers. I don't think there is any other scheme that will make the archive significantly smaller without losing precision. I believe that in most applications a float/double contains almost 32/64 bits of entropy. --Johan