Bo Peng on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 10:38 PM:
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.
Then why cannot we use IEEE745 format for float serialization on all systems?
1. If a systems is IEEE745 compatible, serialize float numbers directly. This will work 99.9% of the times, and will be very efficient. 2. If a system is not IEEE745 compatible, to serialize a float number, we write the number as 32 or 64 continuous bits, in IEEE745 format, to de-serialize a float number, we read the number in IEEE745 formats and write in native float format. An intermediate string representation can be used for the translations.
I mean, these continuous IEEE745 bits are equivalent to your "portable integer serialization format", but will be much more efficient on IEEE745 compatible systems.
A splendid idea! Btw it's IEEE754... ;) But yeah, let's take it for the portable binary archive's standard for floating point values. Machines using a different notion may contribute a conversion algorithm or simply throw an exception. However, the intermediate string approach would be a last resort in my view. Regards, -- Christian Pfligersdorffer Software Engineering http://www.eos.info