Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!voder!wlbr!mh
From: mh@wlbr.EATON.COM (Mike Hoegeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Portability across architectures..
Message-ID: <23344@wlbr.EATON.COM>
Date: 18 Sep 88 18:12:44 GMT
References: <7038@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <3221@geac.UUCP> <641@muffin.cme-durer.ARPA>
Reply-To: mh@wlbr.eaton.com.UUCP (Mike Hoegeman)
Distribution: all
Organization: Eaton IMSD, Westlake Village, CA
Lines: 16

In article <641@muffin.cme-durer.ARPA> libes@cme-durer.arpa (Don Libes) writes:
>There's another possibility besides ASCII and native form: ASN.1
>
>ASN.1 is a set of ISO standards which address the OSI Presentation
>Layer - very similar to the problem you face.
>

You may want to check out the eXternal Data Representation specifcation
as defined by Sun Microsystems. This is  used in NFS and the other
network services using the RPC (remote procedure call) protocol. the
sources are available as well as the specs are in the sun-spots
archives on titan.rice.edu The number of machines that NFS runs on is a
testament to it's portability.


-mike