Data Format Design for Heterogeneous Environments

M. D. Geib
Vista Control Systems Inc.

Our talk will focus on issues involved in designing data formats in multiplatform computing environments. Issues include how to design file formats you can read on any machine and how to transmit data across the network. Particular issues we will discuss are byte ordering, file structure, floating point formats, and the use of intermediate representations. We will present specific solutions we developed. For example, we will show how we developed aformat to standardize time and services to manipulate time formats.