Re: pragma Pack does not work on GNAT 5.01a for Redhat Linux.

["Bob Spooner" <rls19@psu.edu>]

"Simon Wright" <simon.j.wright@mac.com> wrote in message 
news:m2hcp2e4fv.fsf@mac.com...
>
> There's always a price to pay, of course; the packing isn't dense, and
> it can be quite a challenge to work out what bytes are actually being
> sent (eg, if you find yourself having to talk to C after all).

Yes, XDR takes care of things like endianness, etc. that otherwise get in 
the way, but as you point out, there's always a price to be paid for 
generality. In some cases it looks like it even will take care of differing 
floating point representations, although I wonder about out of range 
problems when converting. Isn't there an XDR library for C? I know that 
there is one for Fortran. I would think that as long as you have an XDR 
library for the language with which you need to communicate, you wouldn't 
have to decode the bytes yourself; or have I misunderstood what you are 
saying?

Bob