There was a recent discussion on this list regarding portable representation of floating point numbers. No one was able to find a portable way to transmit all types of NaNs from one machine architecture/compiler to any other. That is, the effort is stymied even before issues of representation arise. Robert Ramey Cliff Green wrote:
Sometimes it is necessary to send floats and doubles as well between different hosts.
When dealing with floating points, there's all kinds of issues, including (as already mentioned) IEEE754 or other formats.
By the time you have a generalized "marshalling" scheme that handles integers, floats, strings, etc, you've re-invented protocols such as XDR (eXternal Data Representation - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Data_Representation). Maybe there should be a Boost library for encoding and decoding to XDR? There's other possibilities such as SDXF or CDR (used in Corba).
It would be really nice if boost.asio or boost.whatever automagically handled such floating-point primitives in the most efficient yet portable manner.
Whatever is added to Boost for encoding / marshalling and decoding / unmarshalling should be separate from libraries such as Asio - it can be used by multiple libraries, any time objects / data needs to be transported among multiple platforms / systems, whether through a network or file system ... And definitely there should hooks to Boost.Serialization.
Cliff
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