Towards the beginning of February 2001, the subject of + "binary" I/O was brought up in a couple of places at the + same time. One notable place was Usenet, where James Kanze and + Dietmar Kühl separately posted articles on why attempting + generic binary I/O was not a good idea. (Here are copies of + Kanze's article and + Kühl's article.) +
Briefly, the problems of byte ordering and type sizes mean that
+ the unformatted functions like ostream::put() and
+ istream::get() cannot safely be used to communicate
+ between arbitrary programs, or across a network, or from one
+ invocation of a program to another invocation of the same program
+ on a different platform, etc.
+
The entire Usenet thread is instructive, and took place under the + subject heading "binary iostreams" on both comp.std.c++ + and comp.lang.c++.moderated in parallel. Also in that thread, + Dietmar Kühl mentioned that he had written a pair of stream + classes that would read and write XDR, which is a good step towards + a portable binary format. +