[ensembl-dev] Perl BLOBs in the ensembl compara database

[Keith James]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Flicek <flicek at ebi.ac.uk> writes:

    Paul> Although we do the best we can to make everything
    Paul> accessible, making everything completely independent of the
    Paul> architecture that we run on is not really feasible given our
    Paul> level of funding, priorities, etc.

    Paul> Our goal with the database and API code is to serve
    Paul> bioinformaticians wanting to do biological analysis (rather
    Paul> than those wanting to write alternate API implementations
    Paul> :).

    Paul> That said, in the medium term we will take a look at ways
    Paul> that we can further generalise the code and how to access
    Paul> the data.

I've been lurking on this thread, but thought I'd butt in with an
observation. Would explicity using IEEE 754 floats be an answer?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE754

It's fairly straightforward to implement from scratch, given the
spec. (I've done this for another language). It also gets you such
niceties as NaNs and infinity, if you choose to handle them.

You'd still need to document which endianess is used, but it would
become independent of the platform.

Keith

-- 
Keith James Ph.D. <kdj at sanger.ac.uk> - http://github.com/keithj