On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek@r-project.org
> wrote:

>
> On Jun 25, 2012, at 10:20 AM, andre zege wrote:
>
> > dput() is intended to be parsed by R so the above is not possible
> without massaging the output. But why in the would would you use dput() for
> something that you want to read in Java? Why don't you use a format that
> Java can read easily - such as JSON?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Simon
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yeap, except i was just working with someone elses choice. Bigmatrix
> code uses dput() to dump desc file of filebacked matrices.
>
> Ah, ok, that is indeed rather annoying as it's pretty much the most
> non-portable storage (across programs) one could come up with. (I presume
> you're talking about big.matrix from bigmemory?)
>
>
> > I got some time to do a little hack of reading big matrices nicely to
> java and was looking to some ways of smoothing the edges of parsing .desc
> file a little. I guess i am ok  now with parsing .desc with some regex. One
> thing i am still wondering about is whether i really need to convert back
> and forth between liitle endian and big endian. Namely, java platform has
> little endian native byte order, and big matrix code writes stuff in big
> endian. It'd be nice if i could manipulate that by some #define somewhere
> in the makefile or something and make C++ write little endian without byte
> swapping every time i need to communicate with big matrix from java.
>
> I think you're wrong (if we are talking about bigmemory) - the endianness
> is governed by the platform as far as I can see. On little-endian machines
> the big matrix storage is little endian and on big-endian machines it is
> big-endian.
>
> It's very peculiar that the descriptor doesn't even store the endianness -
> I think you could talk to the authors and suggest that they include most
> basic information such as endianness and, possibly, change the format to
> something that is well-defined without having to evaluate it in R (which is
> highly dangerous and a serious security risk).
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>

I would assume that hardware should dictate endianness, just like you said.
However, the fact is that bigmemory writes in different endianness than
java reads in. I simply compare matrices that i write using bigmemory and
that I read into java. Unless i transform endianness, i get gargabe, and if
i swap byte order, i get the same matrix as the one i wrote. So, i don't
think i am wrong about that, but i am curious about why it happens and
whether it is possible to let bigmemory code write in natural endianness.
Then i would not need to transform each double array element back and
forth.

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