[Boost-users] Re: Re: Serialization with NaN and infinity

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-06 13:53:09

native binary archives are generally NOT portable accross platforms.  This
is highlighted in the documentation an is the motivating factor in preparing
the demo demo_portable archive.  Text base archives are meant to be
portable, but of course at the cost of speed and archive size.

I did a tiny bit of googling and found that Nan isn't the only issue.  There
is also +/- INF .  So the whole subject would need a more thorough treatment

Robert Ramey

Austin Bingham wrote:
>> a) I believe that native binary archives will handle this without
>> out change as they just copy the bits to the archive and back.  As
>> long as you read the archive on the same compiler/os/machine, there
>> should be no issue.
>
> I think I've been misinterpreting this bit here. I originally took
> this to mean that the binary archives are not portable across
> platforms. Is this the case, or is it just that NaN specifically isn't
> portable (to non-IEEE 754 machines, I guess)? In the end, we're hoping
> to use the binary format anyway, and i can work around the text format
> limitations since I'll only be using it for debugging.
>