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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,comp.unix.wizards,comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Float to sign/exp/mantissa
Message-ID: <1407@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 8 Apr 89 23:16:09 GMT
References: <1026@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP> <1044@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Followup-To: comp.sources.wanted
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 11

>    What I am doing is writing a Machine Independant Format (MIF) similar to
> XDR that Sun has. This arose out of the fact that some of the machines
> that we need to use do not have XDR support.. So I am writing my own.

You may want to grab Sun's XDR source from, say, "uunet", instead; it's
in the "comp.sources.unix" archives.  It may not have support for your
floating-point format, but at least it's a start.

Basically, the XDR form is big-endian IEEE.  The code is
machine-dependent; the VAX version represents the VAX format as a
structure with bit fields, and extracts and inserts the fields that way.