Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!pasteur!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!edmoy
From: edmoy@violet.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: North America (5 of 5)
Message-ID: <14352@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 16 Sep 88 17:14:47 GMT
References: <1202@cleo.SW.MCC.COM> <4064@umd5.umd.edu> <68580@sun.uucp>
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Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <68580@sun.uucp> falk@sun.uucp (Ed Falk) writes:
>For those who are interested, I'm including a short shell archive containing
>the program above and two programs to pack and the files into a more
>compact form....

To save everyone a lot of grief, any binary compression like that specified
by Ed Falk should be written in a more device independent way, ie, machine's
byte-order independent (big-endian/little-endian).  Alos, and more importantly,
floating point formats also differ among machines.

I think the most device-independent format is still ASCII.  Some sort of
differential encoding, where each pair of coordinates is actually a difference
from the last pair, would save on size.  Also, having a fixed number of
decimal digits would allow suppression of the decimal point, again saving
on size.

Edward Moy				Principal Programmer - Macintosh & Unix
Workstation Support Services		Workstation Software Support Group
University of California
Berkeley, CA  94720

edmoy@violet.Berkeley.EDU
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