Float to sign/exp/mantissa

[Guy Harris]

>    What I am doing is writing a Machine Independant Format (MIF) similar to
> XDR that Sun has. This arose out of the fact that some of the machines
> that we need to use do not have XDR support.. So I am writing my own.

You may want to grab Sun's XDR source from, say, "uunet", instead; it's
in the "comp.sources.unix" archives.  It may not have support for your
floating-point format, but at least it's a start.

Basically, the XDR form is big-endian IEEE.  The code is
machine-dependent; the VAX version represents the VAX format as a
structure with bit fields, and extracts and inserts the fields that way.