Re: Byte-swapping at load time

[Lisa Parratt <lisa@...>]

Mike Pall wrote:
> Hi,
>
> umm ... we had that discussion half a year ago. And there was
> even a broad consensus which lead to the current implementation:
> the core does native loading only -- conversion is done with
> external tools (e.g. ChunkSpy).

Could a coordinated project to create a standard library, seperate from 
the main Lua distribution, that dumps/undumps in a universal format, be 
useful?

It could, for example, employ fixed endianity regardless of the 
underlying native one, use arbitrary precision values for integers[1], 
uses pairs of mantissas and exponents to express floats, etc.

This would provide a standard way of dumping and undumping without 
platform problems for only a small performance penalty, and wouldn't 
bloat the core Lua to boot.

[1] e.g. MIDI numbers, where bit 8 set means the number continues in the 
next byte.

--
Lisa
http://www.thecommune.org.uk/~lisa/