[clean-list] Serializing Atomic Data Types...

[Fabien Todescato]

Dear Cleaners,

Is there an efficient means to convert Reals and Ints to their binary
representation stored in a String, and back ?

In C, provided some care is taken about the byte alignment of structures
member, it is possible to use a union to implement that conversion in
constant time, as is illustrated below.

union {
  unsigned long unsignedLong ;
  struct {
    char byte0 ;
    char byte1 ;
    char byte2 ;
    char byte3 ;
  } unsignedLongBytes ;
}

I am considering the implementation of binary serialization of some data
structures, but am stuck for the atomic data types Int and Real...

Thanks...

Fabien TODESCATO

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Taxi Driver to Passenger : "Sure I could, but the boss told me not to leave
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