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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: Fri, 05 Mar 2004 14:29:42 +0100
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Date: 2004-03-05T14:29:42+01:00
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Marius Amado Alves wrote:

>> ... Also, there is a small performance penalty paid for
>> shuffling bits around to achieve platform independence.
> 
> But surely less than converting to an ASCII image and back. (I suspect
> that, contrary to what has been indicated, the significant performance
> loss in the ASCII solution is of time, not space.)

It could be, but it depends largely of the numbers to represent...
If you represent the number "1.0", it requires 4 bytes (with string 
terminator).
If you have the number "1.33333333333333333333333e+05", it could need 30 or 
more characters to store...

About the time penalty, it's usually not a problem.  If someone wants to 
pass numbers between different environnments, it's usually necessary to 
write them to a file, to send them through a network connection, or 
something else.  In such a case, the time needed to convert the number is 
negligible regarding to the time needed by IO operations...