Leopold Toetsch wrote: > > - 8/12 byte float issues are still the same - are these > formats really portable, or should we try to store > ASCII equivalents?
No? ? Because my knowledge here approaches zero, so I'm just aping information back at you from google searches and scanning documents. There are 3 standard binary IEEE 754 derived formats: Single Precision: 4 bytes Double Precision: 8 bytes Quadruple Precision: 16 bytes C99 and Modula 3 provide the "recommended" IEEE 754 bindings. Java requires it. A nice quote from William Kahan father of IEEE 754: "Programmers seem unaware that IEEE 754 is a standard for their programming environment, not just for hardware." Portable Encoding of Floating-Point Values http://research.microsoft.com/~hollasch/cgindex/coding/portfloat.html What hardware supports IEEE 754: http://www.mscs.mu.edu/~georgec/IFAQ/casares1.html IEEE 754 Binary Floating Point William Kahan's documents: http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/ IEE 754 Homepage: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/ Designing Language Support for IEEE 754: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/meeting-materials/2001-10-18-langdesign.p df IEEE 754 Support in C99 http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/meeting-materials/2001-07-18-c99.pdf Nice Overview: http://research.microsoft.com/~hollasch/cgindex/coding/ieeefloat.html Nice Links: http://cch.loria.fr/documentation/IEEE754/ IEEE 854 Decimal Floating Point IBM's decNumber Library (non-free ANSI C impl of IEEE 854): http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decnumber.html IBM's BigDecimal (open-source impl for Java of IEEE 854): http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimalj/ -- Garrett Goebel IS Development Specialist ScriptPro Direct: 913.403.5261 5828 Reeds Road Main: 913.384.1008 Mission, KS 66202 Fax: 913.384.2180 www.scriptpro.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
