3 ms·
I can think of a few possible problems with IEEE754-across-the-wire, such as: - not all hardware supports them - subnormal numbers are annoying - NaNs can be
by dbaupp 8y ago
I can think of a few possible problems with IEEE754-across-the-wire, such as:
- not all hardware supports them
- subnormal numbers are annoying
- NaNs can be tricky to handle, such as signalling and (if payloads are used) security risks through NaN payloads.
Which are you thinking of? Or something else?
- jcelerier 8y ago> I can think of a few possible problems with IEEE754-across-the-wire, such as: > - not all hardware supports them let's be reasonable : how many people who run architectures which don't have any float would actually send floats to them over the network ?
- gnufx 8y agoThe parent didn't say "don't have any float". I have had to translate between little endian IEEE754 and big endian IBM format, roughly copying what HDF did. Protein crystallographers invented their own binary file format rather than just using HDF, and didn't define the binary floating point format, so that the files weren't portable initially.
- taneq 8y agoI was mainly thinking of byte order issues and handling of NaN / infinities (especially if, say, you're sending a value from one computer with FPU exceptions disabled to another one with exceptions enabled), but I seem to recall reading about other subtle implementation differences which tended to mean that floats aren't always portable between different CPUs even if they're ostensibly all IEEE compliant.