RE: I-D ACTION:draft-jaffer-metric-interchange-format-02.txt

["Manoj Dhooria" <manojd at geometricsoftware.com>]

Good overview, Jaffer. Am copying to general list too to draw attention to a
related issue of which I don't know of an adequate internet standard & for
which I had to invent my own representation.

I am into distributed engineering software development, & keeping precision
of floating point values is extremely important for me - even when they will
be transmitted over the net & across CPU architectures. Using printf()
format is guaranteed to lose precision, even though I can limit the loss by
giving lots of significant digits. Also, using a large number of significant
digits increases number of octets to be included in the message.

What I essentially do is transform the source CPU's native representation to
IEEE floating point representation; then print it out as a sequence of hex
bytes; then run an optimizer on it to drop some of the "unnecessary" octets
(guaranteeing that the original hex sequence can be reconstructed at the
receiver end; no dropping of bytes for numbers where I can not guarantee
this).

If there are others on the mailing list facing this issue, I would like to
interact. May be we can have a standard way. I could publish my technique as
an internet draft, if required. If there is already a public spec for it,
may be someone would be kind enough to share. Thank you.

Manoj Dhooria
Geometric Software [www.geometricsoftware.com]
Bombay

-----Original Message-----
From: nsyracus at cnri.reston.va.us [mailto:nsyracus at cnri.reston.va.us]On
Behalf Of Internet-Drafts at ietf.org
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 6:04 PM
To: IETF-Announce:
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-jaffer-metric-interchange-format-02.txt


A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.


	Title		: Representation of numerical values and SI units in
                          character strings for information interchanges
	Author(s)	: A. Jaffer
	Filename	: draft-jaffer-metric-interchange-format-02.txt
	Pages		:
	Date		: 22-Jan-01

This document describes a character string encoding for numerical
values and units which:
* is unambiguous in all locales;
* uses only

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http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-jaffer-metric-interchange-format-0
2.txt

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