[LCP]struct size <offline>

[Mike & Penny Novack]

> At 10:25 AM -0400 8/19/01, Mike & Penny Novack wrote:
> >existing file (can't go back in time). BINARY FILES ARE NOT
PORTABLE**.
>
> Depends on what you mean by portable.  You can use things like
> hton(), ntoh(), etc. and get very good results.  That is how most
> network communications is done.
>

Offline because a bit more "production" oriented than suitable for this
list.

The context in which I mean "binary" is related to the original question
"just how much space does this structure occupy?". In other words, if I
have an application which writes such structures out to some file (they
might be read in by another) then I cannot expect this to be portable.
All the components would have to be compiled by the same version of the
compiler, etc.

That can be a great nuisance when files are sent between shops but as I
was trying to point out, also a problem over time. You can of course
"remake" all the components of a system but that only solves the problem
of CURRENT passing of files. Say I have a system which creates such
files, perhaps a component of that system produces some printout report
from the file. You change some component of the system, recompile
EVERYTHING (because the compiler may be different than at the time of
the last previous change) and everything still works OK. But what
happens when the auditors say "please run us a copy of that report from
the yearend file of six years ago". OOPS, at the time THAT file was
created the creating program had been compiled by some earlier version
of the compiler (which may have assigned "slack" differently).

Hey -- one of my fun activities used to be emergency writing of
"bridges" to convert some old file to match the current layout.

Mike