From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-07-09T14:40:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshal's handling of floats

On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Brian Palmer wrote:

> I was thinking about writing a patch to modify how Marshal handles floats, 
> right now it dumps them using sprintf(3) and stores the resulting string in 
> the Marshal stream. I'd like to see it handle floats the same way that 
> Array#pack does:
>
> [400.53].pack('g').length == 4
> [400.53].pack('G').length == 8
>
> while
>
> Marshal.dump(400.53).length - 3 == 22
> (and is slower, to boot)
>
> I want to make sure, though, that this would be an acceptable patch. I can't 
> think why it would be OK for Array#pack to work this way and not Marshal, but 
> is there any particular reason why it can't be done? Obviously it would break 
> backwards compatability with older Marshal dumps, but I don't think they're 
> often used for long-term storage, are they?
>
> -- Brian Palmer

i've never tried to use marshaled data across a big and little endian machine
- but this would break it.  consider drb: if you had a mac and a linux box
talking on the wire you might see

   harp:~ > ruby -e'  puts [1.44417819733316e-41].pack("g").reverse.unpack("g")[0].to_i  '
   42

which could be confusing.  then again maybe i'm overlooking something.

cheers.

-a
-- 
suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama