From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2006-07-10T08:52:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshal's handling of floats

Hi,

In message "Re: Marshal's handling of floats"
    on Sun, 9 Jul 2006 13:31:59 +0900, Brian Palmer <rubytalk@brian.codekitchen.net> writes:

|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.  

There are issues:

  * pack('g') would not work on non-IEEE floating machines.
  * changing marshal format in incompatible way causes a lot of
    troubles, so that it should be avoided if possible.

I think we can merge it for 1.9 (if we address IEEE754 issue).

							matz.