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Network standard for floating point numbers?

Network standard for floating point numbers?

Post by Peter Johanss » Tue, 10 Aug 1993 06:58:57



I'm writing a network application where I need to pass double
precision floating point values between many different architectures.
Is there a good/standard way of doing this?

I have noticed that SGI and SPARC machines use the same internal
formats, and DEC (r2k, r3k) machines use the same format, but with the
byte ordering reversed.  I _could_ cast the double value to an
unsigned long and then send it through htonl() and ntohl(), but that
would cause all sorts of problems if I ever came across a machine that
used some other form of internal representation.

Any suggestions?

Please reply via e-mail; I will summarize to the net.

Peter Johansson

 
 
 
Top

1. Network standard for floating point numbers? [summary]

[ I'm sorry I couldn't thread this to my original posting, but it
expired on our news server. ]


I would like to thank everyone who replied.  The nearly unanimous

gave the best summary:

The xdr library seems to be available on every machine that supports
nfs and rpc -- just about everybody these days.  xdr uses the IEEE-754
standard for floating point, so the conversion from double is a no-op
for most machines.

Given the near universal usage of IEEE-754 representation, a fact I
was previously unaware of, I have decided to use it directly in my
protocol.  To keep things simple, I have decided not to use the xdr
library until such time as a conversion to IEEE-754 is actually
required.

Peter Johansson

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