From help-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Fri Jan 20 05:07:23 1995
Subject: Raw file i/o
From: Guido Dietz <guido at aia dot RWTH-Aachen dot DE>
To: John Eaton <jwe at che dot utexas dot edu>
Cc: help-octave at che dot utexas dot edu
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 12:05:58 +0100

You wrote:

> Superuser AIA <root at aia dot RWTH-Aachen dot DE> wrote:
>
> : Hello OCTAVE users,
> : 
> : For further use of our old MATLAB programs and datas we needed a
> : procedure for a raw file i/o like in the new MATLAB fread and
> : fwrite.
> 
> Thanks for the changes.
> 
> We already have an implementation of these functions installed for the
> next release, but they don't seem to have all the functionality of
> your changes.  I would like to try to merge in any improvements, but I
> think that will have to wait until after 1.1 is released.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> jwe

I wrote you a few days before, now the work is beeing tested:

We just encoded the feature to read and write by fread and
fwrite with specified formats. Therefore we implemented the new
builtin-variable "raw_io_format" wich can have the values "default",
"ieee-little", "ieee-big", "vax-d" or "vax-g".

Method:
* Changes in "src/variables.cc", "src/user-prefs.cc", 
  "src/user-prefs.h" for implementing the new builtin-variable.
* Extracting and modifying the int and float conversion routines
  from "src/load-save.cc" to "liboctave/FConc.cc", 
  "liboctave/FConc.h" and "liboctave/FSwap.h". Changes in 
  "liboctave/Makefile.in".
* implementing the conversion routines in "liboctave/dMatrix.cc".

ToDo:
* All the various conversion routines vax>cray, ieee>cray, .......;
  but I don't know whether I can do that ...

After some testings (two or three days) I will send you a patch and
hope that you will add it to the next release.

Bye G.