Re: Question about NML

[Will Shackleford <shackle-at-cme.nist.gov>]

I missed the xdr question.?

xdr stands for eXternal Data Representation. 

Different processors use different representations for the basic types.
"int"s could be 16 bit, 32 bit, or 64 bit.
some processors put/expect the least sigificant byte first while others
use the most significant byte first.
 To communicate between different processors we need to convert to some 
neutral representation. Theoretically we might someday support ASN.1 or NDR as options. "ascii" and "disp" are both ascii text representations which are useful when directly connecting from languages other than C/C++/Java and parsing the binary format is difficult. "disp" is just the newer version of the ascii format, which is comma rather than zero delimited.

-- Will

 
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William Penn Shackleford III			shackle-at-nist.gov
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