Christopher James Huff wrote:
> 
> It is portable.
> The portability problem with binary data comes from the fact that the 
> native format may have a different layout on different platforms. The 
> FNG code encodes and decodes the actual bit pattern, and will read and 
> write it the same way on all platforms.
> 

And actually the same would be possible for 32bit floating point values, 
you just would need to have a convention for the distribution of bits 
for mantissa/exponent and a file format storing 32bit values (which png 
IIRC does not).  And of course reading such files would be slower than 
reading the native binary format of that particular platform.

Christoph

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