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From: "David C. Hoos" <david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Endianness independance
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 11:49:09 -0600
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Date: 2003-03-05T11:49:09-06:00


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
To: <comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 11:28 AM
Subject: Re: Endianness independance
<snip>
> 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!
> 
Agreed.  However, at the end of the day, there is no solution at all
for communication between machines with differing ranges for the
exponent and mantissa, so the notion of platform independence
must have certain caveats about some details of the platforms which
must at least support some level of commonality.