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From: pburnand0-news@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Little Endian -> Big Endian (Ada95 / GNAT),
 Whats with floating point types?
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Reply-To: pburnand0-news@yahoo.com
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 06:32:38 +0100
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Date: 2004-03-04T06:32:38+01:00
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Joachim Schr�er wrote:

> A short question:
> 
> It's not so simple with floating point types, just swapping bytes, or is
> it? One has to swap all the bits or?
> Interfaces.IEEE_Float_32 has 1 bit sign, 23 bit mantissa and 8 bit
> exponent, Interfaces.IEEE_Float_64 has 1 bit sign, 52 bit mantissa and 11
> bit exponent when I remember correctly.
> 
> 
>     Achim

That's not easy because floats are really machine dependant.  That's not a 
simple endianess question.

The universal solution for this is to store your floating point number in 
ASCII in a string and then store the string.  That takes more place, but 
there is no portability problems since in every case, a float converted to 
a string always from left to right.  Then it's even possible to use the 
number using a different format or precision...

This way of doing is massively used in the database world...