Re: reading/writing binary data

[Aleksandar Bakic <bakicale@cps.msu.edu>]

In case you are interested in an "XDR in Scheme" package and a XDR to
Scheme translator, e-mail me.

Aleks

> 
> 
> I'd like to write a guile script to communicate with a program that
> reads and writes data in binary format - 32 bit numeric values are
> written as four bytes in host byte order. I can get Guile to read this
> in as a string of four chars, but is there a reasonably portable way
> to convert that into a Scheme number (and vice versa for communicating
> the other way)? I can think of the simple-minded approach of using
> char->integer on each byte, bitshifting and adding, but I'd rather not
> put knowledge of the host's endianness into the script, and I'm hoping
> there's some primitives that can help do it more efficiently, although
> I don't know of any.
> 
>  - Maciej
> 
> 


-- 
Aleksandar Bakic, Comp.Sci. graduate student at Michigan State University
e-mail: bakicale@cps.msu.edu