On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 11:40:04PM +0100, fons adriaensen wrote:
On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 05:25:04PM -0500, Paul Davis
wrote:
On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 23:10 +0100, fons
adriaensen wrote:
Is it true on the common platforms that using
ntohl and htonl on
floats will always result in compatible data on the wire or in a
file ? In other words, are floats byte-swapped consistently w.r.t.
the Intel format on all big-endian systems ?
network byte order was defined to be big-endian in the early 1980s.
those two functions create big-endian 32 bit representations regardless
of the host platform.
That much I know, so let me rephrase the question: is network byte order
also defined for single precision IEEE floats ? If not, is there a de
facto standard ?
as paul stated, network byte order is defined to be
big-endian, so yes, you have to convert 32 bit floats (and
doubles, for that matter) on intel, because they are stored
lsb first. of course it would be perfectly valid for netjack
to use little endian `on the wire'; but this would be like
putting my powerbook in little endian mode when playing a
wav file. sort of.
<sk>