From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,febd9e55846c9556 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-03-05 09:32:18 PST Message-ID: <3E6633C7.8000503@cogeco.ca> From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Endianness independance References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 12:28:39 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.47.195 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1046885319 198.96.47.195 (Wed, 05 Mar 2003 12:28:39 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 12:28:39 EST Organization: Bell Sympatico Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!cyclone.bc.net!torn!webster!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:34922 Date: 2003-03-05T12:28:39-05:00 List-Id: Simon Wright wrote: > "David C. Hoos, Sr." writes: > >>If all you want is platform-independence, then replace the file >>s-stratt.adb in your standard gnat distribution with the one from >>the same version of glade, and re-compile and rebuild the library >>files (.a), and you have what you want. Now, as long as your types >>are declared the same on both platforms (with no representation >>clauses) you will have platform- independence. > > You can certainly use the 3.14 GLADE file with 3.15 (and I think > GCC-3, too). Not a huge amount of change. > > I suspect you'd be well advised to have the same release at both ends, > even so! If you look carefully at GLADE, you will notice that all that is being done there is "byte swapping". There is more to independent network formats than that (it just happens to work with _most_ modern platforms at the moment). The problem that XDR solved was that they specified a network independent format for floating point types. If you try to use GLADE on hosts that use different floating point formats, then no amount of byte swapping is going to make them compatible! I would have preferred to see GLADE make use of the XDR facilities that are available on any Linux/UNIX platform, and I am certain that XDR exists in some form on any Windows platform that supports DCOM. XDR would give you true compatibility at the floating point type level, in addition to the less difficult types like integers. Perhaps someone can take on that XDR project for the NG Glade? ;-) -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg