Efficiently importing/export GMP floats

[Marc Glisse]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Joerg Arndt wrote:

> * foxmuldrster at yahoo.com <foxmuldrster at yahoo.com> [Jan 17. 2011 15:11]:
>> I do not see where network byte order is in any way desirable, as it
>> necessarily mandates manipulation on any machine with an alternate
>> native endian format.
>
> Are you kidding?

I am not sure why you are reacting so strongly against this suggestion.

> Note the "overhead" is usually a single machine instruction (bswap).

Having to use bswap also prohibits some of the usual optimizations of 
memcpy.

> Making the overhead come back, conditionally...

Only when necessary. That seems like a nice property.

>> Requiring conversions both in and out on some architectures seems
>> wholly undesirable.
>
> Undesirable as in _networking_ ?

Networking would not be the only use. And even for networking, as long as 
the encoding includes the endianness information...

>> It should only be required whenever it happens
>> to be different.
>
> You do not know in general if it's required.

Do you pull the seat down when you exit the bathroom?

-- 
Marc Glisse