From: Brian Palmer <rubytalk@...>
Date: 2006-07-11T00:06:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshal's handling of floats

Hey Robert, I have gone with another solution but just as an aside --  
we're talking about the Marshal class, not YAML. I definitely  
wouldn't suggest storing anything in YAML as binary data :)

-- Brian


On Jul 10, 2006, at 1:50 AM, 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.
>
> Another solution - if you want to make use of this: AFAIK you can  
> customize YAMLfication of classes.  If that was true, you can  
> pretty easily perform the conversion during to conversion to and  
> from YAML.  That would be the way to go IMHO.
>
> Kind regards
>
>    robert
>
>