tilly's response reminded me of a key tidbit that I read in perlpacktut:

Floating point Numbers

For packing floating point numbers you have the choice between the pack codes f and d which pack into (or unpack from) single-precision or double-precision representation as it is provided by your system. (There is no such thing as a network representation for reals, so if you want to send your real numbers across computer boundaries, you'd better stick to ASCII representation, unless you're absolutely sure what's on the other end of the line.)


Dave


In reply to Re: Re: Unpacking Floating Point on architectures with different endians by davido
in thread Unpacking Floating Point on architectures with different endians by HaveBlue

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.