[Tinyos-devel] external (nx*) types and floating point

[David Gay]

There's currently no nx_float / nx_double type that would allow use of
floating point in protocols.

Two questions:
- how necessary are such types? (w/o them, you have to figure out some
integer encoding for any real numbers you have to deal with)

- does anybody have some portable code (and not too large...) for
converting an array of bytes to a float/double? (that's the main
sticking point as far as I'm concerned)

Some additional comments:
- specifying these types as IEEE 32 and 64-bit numbers seems reasonable

- I'm reluctant to include platform-specific code w/ the nesC
distribution to deal with nx_float/nx_double, as it feels like it
would make nesC maintenance more painful

- we could actually  define nx_float/nx_double in TinyOS (on a
per-chip or per-platform basis, e.g.) - external types are defined by
a magic (undocumented) attribute, so can fairly easily be added
independent of nesC

David Gay