Good overview, Jaffer. Am copying to general list too to draw attention to a
related issue of which I don't know of an adequate internet standard & for
which I had to invent my own representation.
I am into distributed engineering software development, & keeping precision
of floating point values is extremely important for me - even when they will
be transmitted over the net & across CPU architectures. Using printf()
format is guaranteed to lose precision, even though I can limit the loss by
giving lots of significant digits. Also, using a large number of significant
digits increases number of octets to be included in the message.
What I essentially do is transform the source CPU's native representation to
IEEE floating point representation; then print it out as a sequence of hex
bytes; then run an optimizer on it to drop some of the "unnecessary" octets
(guaranteeing that the original hex sequence can be reconstructed at the
receiver end; no dropping of bytes for numbers where I can not guarantee
this).
If there are others on the mailing list facing this issue, I would like to
interact. May be we can have a standard way. I could publish my technique as
an internet draft, if required. If there is already a public spec for it,
may be someone would be kind enough to share. Thank you.
Manoj Dhooria
Geometric Software [www.geometricsoftware.com]
Bombay
-----Original Message-----
From: nsyracus(_at_)cnri(_dot_)reston(_dot_)va(_dot_)us
[mailto:nsyracus(_at_)cnri(_dot_)reston(_dot_)va(_dot_)us]On
Behalf Of Internet-Drafts(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 6:04 PM
To: IETF-Announce:
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-jaffer-metric-interchange-format-02.txt
A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.
Title : Representation of numerical values and SI units in
character strings for information interchanges
Author(s) : A. Jaffer
Filename : draft-jaffer-metric-interchange-format-02.txt
Pages :
Date : 22-Jan-01
This document describes a character string encoding for numerical
values and units which:
* is unambiguous in all locales;
* uses only
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2.txt
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