From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2006-07-10T23:07:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshal's handling of floats

Robert Klemme wrote:
> Brian Palmer <rubytalk@brian.codekitchen.net> wrote:
>> Hi Ara,
>>
>> The 'g' and 'G' flags for Array#pack/String#unpack are in network
>> byte order, so they're in a platform-independent format, as far as I
>> know. I actually tested this by Packing a couple thousand floats on
>> my Mac, sending them in UDP packets and unpacking them on my AMD64
>> desktop, they all came across correctly.
> 
> Yeah, but I still see serious drawbacks of your proposal:
> 
> - it will break existing code (YAML data)
> 
> - it's not human readable which is one of the key advantages (YAML files 
> seem to be frequently written by hand as a nice user interface to config 
> data)
> 
> - it's not portable and it might not be compliant with YAML spec
> 
> In sum all these are serious showstoppers for a general change of YAML 
> behavior.

I thought the OP wanted to change the behavior of Marshal, not YAML. Or 
are you saying that the YAML rep'n would also have to change so that 
both formats have the same lossiness?

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407