From: nobu.nokada@...
Date: 2003-04-21T00:07:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Roundoff problem with Float and Marshal

Hi,

At Fri, 18 Apr 2003 23:53:48 +0900,
Rudi Cilibrasi wrote:
> I believe the idea itself is endian-safe, and the patch as posted
> it almost safe.  It does not assume a binary format, it checks; The line
> if (b[0] == 0xc8b43958 && b[1] == 0x3ff3be76)
> may need to be adjusted to include the check that it is a little-endian
> machine (if floating point numbers are reversed on big-endian machines).  

It works only with IEEE754.  It is the reason I called it "less
portable".

> I don't want to solve the problem for every machine to convert
> between little and big endian.  I just want it to work on the most common
> machine, the one I am using, and not break the others.  I am confident it
> won't break the other platforms because they will set the floatingType
> bits to FT_OTHER, which means that the 2 binary bytes at the end are
> simply ignored, and so we are back to the original behavior.

I'm not against that point.

> The important point would be that the least significant floating-point
> mantissa 8 bits are put in the first byte, then the next least significant
> 6 bits in the second byte.  This is endian-safe so long as you put them
> back right, and are using IEEE754.

Sorry, but I can't understand why you call it endian-safe.  It
seems to definitely depend on the endian.

-- 
Nobu Nakada