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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: Building portable data structure (NOT a newbie question?)
Date: 1996/12/27
Message-ID: <1996Dec27.133657.1@eisner>#1/1
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Date: 1996-12-27T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <afniiik9q3c42e.fsf@Elysium.i-have-a-misconfigured-system-so-shoot-me>, afniii@hades.arl.psu.edu writes:

> There are a pile load of classes and records which are shared among
> machines. They are recorded to a movable medium (such as disk) and 
> moved to the other machine for access in some cases. In others they
> are sent via a TCP/IP socket. In all cases the machine distribion is
> heterogenous (sorry, but this is the part that makes it a challenge).
> So I need a way to convert the lowest primitives (ie: discrete types
> and floating point types) into a platform indepenent form. Still need
> to minimize memory and disk allocation (cpu resources are cheap and
> abundant) so converting everything to a string is out (but has been
> considered).
> 
> Oh yeah. I almost forgot. No CORBA, IDL's or such either. I can't
> afford them and I want the compiler to catch most of my errors for
> me. If I didn't want that, I would program in C. :)

If you eventually give up and convert everything to a string, I
would recommend the ASN.1 format as it has enough self-checking
to make afficianados of C run in terror.

Larry Kilgallen