John Stanton wrote:
If you really want a data structure which is independent of processor
architecture and compilers why not byte encode the numbers into what
would be described in Pascal as a Packed Array of Char. Then byte
ordering, word alignment etc are irrelevant.
It does require that the client have a function which transforms and
recovers the numbers to the particular format needed by the client
processor/compiler combination but has the advantage that the data may
be shared by Big Endian/Little Endian/RISC and CISC machines.
The extreme case would be to store the numbers as ASCII decimal strings,
rather inefficient but a common way of storing numeric data when it must
be broadly accessable.
JS
You are describing here the thing that's called serialization. See one
of my previous post in this thread about that.
My favorite lib for serialization is boost::serialization allows
serialization of c++ objects into binary, text(ascii) or xml strings and
more...
for example,
struct intDouble {
int x;
int y;
};
would be serialized in xml this way:
<intDouble class_id="0" tracking_level="0" version="0">
<x>1</x>
<y>2</y>
</intDouble>
http://www.google.ca/search?q=boost+serialization
