Re: Q: IEEE-Float byte order on Network convention

[Deepak Chandrashekar <deepak at thehelm dot com>]

Hi,

  With reference to your question : They are certain grey areas

Are you going to use arbitrary precision Floating point ?
if so it is going to be almost imposible for any client
machine to get the data correctly as each of them should
know the no of bytes to be recieved in advance even if they
know the byte ordering scheme involved.So some kind of scheme
should be evolved.It is not dependent on the compiler and the
code generation system of either machines.

I might be wrong ... do correct me if I am.

                    -Deepak Chandrashekar

e-mail : deepakc@vsnl.net
Software Engineer
Integra Microsystems pvt ltd.
Bangalore, India

On August 2nd John Mills Wrote
> 
> Hello -
> 
> A question for network gurus:
>  I plan to send binary packets including IEEE floating-point types over an
> InterNet connection between a client and server. The client will initially
> be hosted on an i86 box (interchangeably Linux or WinNT), and later
> possibly a PPC box. The server could be a variety of Win or *nix hosts. I
> will write the code for client and server, but not the net interfaces.
> Transport will be TCP/IP and UDP/IP, will probably use SSL, and may use
> HTTP tunnelling. (I am new to detail on most of these: please excuse any
> obvious contradictions, but do bring them to my attention.)
> 
> I have only done this with packets of my own design on a direct serial
> links between 68K and i86 boxen: the natural orderings were indeed
> different, but (thankfully!) the data types were otherwise compatible for
> the respective compilers. (I put reordering responsibiliy on the
> i86-hosted responders, since they had the lowest overall loading in that 
> net.)
> 
> If there is a convention for byte- and word-order in transfering
> non-integer types over a net connection, I would prefer to observe it.
> Please tell me of any, direct me to references, or share your
> experiences.
> 
> TIA for any comments.
> 
>  - Mills
> 
>    John Mills
>    Sr. Software Engineer
>    TGA Technologies, Inc.
>    100 Pinnacle Way, Suite 140
>    Norcross, GA 30071-3633
>    e-mail: jmills@tga.com
>    Phone: 770-441-2100 ext.124 (voice)
>           770-449-7740 (FAX)
> 
> 
> 


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