passing floats in inet socket-based IPC

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1990Nov29.224651.26522 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <1990Nov26.164122.6152 at noose.ecn.purdue.edu> luj at delta.ecn.purdue.edu (Jun Lu) writes:
>>Is there a quick/neat way to passing floats in inet socket-based IPC, just
>>like we "routinely" do for passing ints on "popular" architectures( with
>>just some hton or ntoh conversions) ?
>In a word, no.  There is too much diversity in floating-point formats to
>admit of any graceful general solution that's also quick and simple.

What I do is to split the float into integral exponent and significand,
using the UNIX library functions that support that (frexp et al.).
There are some details to be considered but that's the essence.