Packing/unpacking binary data in C - doubles, 64 bits

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 2:57 PM, Kevin D. Clark
<kevin_d_clark at comcast.net> wrote:
> 4:  Sending binary doubles over the wire can be very complicated.

  Do tell.  :)

> 5:  If at all possible, consider encoding your protocol in ASCII text
> rather than sending binary stuff on the wire.

  I know from past discussions (maybe on the PySIG list) that Bruce is
dealing with hundreds of megabytes of data in an HPC scenario.  This
is one of those situations where overhead matters.

  (His hardware is kind of neat: He's got a big PC to store data, and
a network node with a multi-core Cell processor (CPU architecture of
the PlayStation 3) to do calculations.  The network node does the math
real fast but is I/O poor.)

-- Ben