Ok I see your point that C is ambiguous concerning compiler implementation. I think #pragma pack should work out the padding issue but I'm not sure if the floating point issue is solvable.
I don't have an idea for solving that one... On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com> wrote: > Yuvgoog Greenle wrote: >> >> I'd like to clarify the use case. >> >> Lets say you're writing a client and a server, one is in python and >> the other is C. If these 2 programs need to pass binary information >> between them (lets say over a socket) there are 2 options, it could be >> nice if you could only write the struct once (either in python or in >> C) without any Cython or C extension (for portability and ease of >> development's sake). > > It's not as simple as that. You have to know the binary format layouts > (say, for floating point numbers) and struct padding that's used (since it > can be inserted arbitrarily) on the C side of things, not to mention you > have to arrange the whole the to be put into consistent (network) byte > order. Both sides have to take care of this, since if the server and client > are running on different architectures, there's no guarantees any of these > things will be the same. > > -- > Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/ > San Jose, CA, USA && 37 18 N 121 57 W && AIM/Y!M/Skype erikmaxfrancis > Diplomacy and defense are not substitutes for one another. Either > alone would fail. -- John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
