Re: ideal interface for Random Number Generators?
On Jun 12, 9:18 am, Pete Becker <p...@versatilecoding.com> wrote:
On 2010-06-11 21:01:42 -1000, orz said:
[...]
Funny thing: when you use text for serialization, the target
platform is known at compile time. The details are handled in
the standard library; you don't have to write any
platform-specific code.
Yes and no. I have platform independent code (no #ifdef's)
which reads and writes XDR. Once you've defined the output
format, be it text or otherwise, any "platform specific" code is
only optimization.
For binary serialization the standard would have to specify
details of the protocol, and, perhaps, helper functions that
are not standard C or C++ (e.g. htonl),
Interestingly enough, I've done a significant amount of binary
serialization without every using htonl and company. For
positive integers, there's nothing significantly different
between binary serialization and text, except that the base is
always a power of two (which means a single shift, on machines
where multiplication or division is slow---and in many cases,
the compiler will "optimize" the shift to use byte accesses to
memory), and the encoding is direct: the code for the digit is
the value of the digit.
For floating point, it's a bit more difficult, but the necessary
functions are present in the C library (and thus in C++).
and implement the translation layer. That's far more complex
than specifying and writing a text interface that sits on top
of the text conversion functions that have been around for
forty years.
Yes and no. There is some advantage to knowing that the integer
you are reading is exactly 4 bytes (and each byte is 8 bits).
The real advantage in text serialization is during debugging.
--
James Kanze