Re: [boost] [Review] Boost.Endian

Subject: Re: [boost] [Review] Boost.Endian
From: Vitaly Budovski (vbudovski+news_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-09-08 07:50:48

On 8 September 2011 21:31, Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Several others have also expressed interest in FP, so I'll give it a
> try. Issues:
>
> * Because FP formats vary, just dealing with endianness doesn't ensure
> portability.
> * The endianness of FP and integer values differs on some platforms,
> so we will have to build up a config file with separate entries for
> each platform, and that will take time to mature.
> * Ditto FP sizes.
> * I'm only willing to provide conversion.hpp FP support. Providing
> types that mimic FP types is far beyond my knowledge of how to deal
> with floating point's notorious arithmetic issues.
>

I would also like to add my +1 for float support. You could limit
support to IEEE754 format (32 bit, 64 bit).
I'm not sure how widespread differing endianness between ints and
floats is across the various platforms.
Would it be acceptable to provide a #define that will cause ints and
floats to be treated as having reversed endianness relative to each
other (i.e. if native int is little-endian, float would be
big-endian)?