Precision issue

[Paul Rubin]

"Tim Peters" <tim.one at comcast.net> writes:
> It's vital for marshal to try to reproduce floats across platforms.  It does
> OK at that now, but I think it would be better for marshal to move to a
> binary format.  That's got problems of its own, due to compatibility
> hassles.

If the binary format is ieee754, that should be enough for
compatibility between all ieee754 machines (adjusting for endianness,
right)?

Some library code to convert ieee754 to native format on non-ieee754
machines might be needed, but surely it wouldn't cause worse problems
than the existing decimal encoding already does.  (Do you know for a
fact that anyone is actually using python floats on any machines like
that these days anyway?  I can imagine a few vaxes still running, but
the cray-1's have to all be gone by now).