[Haskell-cafe] Binary IEEE floating point format for AMQP

[Paul Johnson]

I'm working on an implementation of the framing layer for AMQP 
(www.amqp.org).  I almost had 0.9 finished when I found they had 
released the spec for 0.10, so I have to redo quite a lot of work.

Amongst the new features of 0.10 are wire formats for floating point.  
These are the 4 and 8 byte IEEE formats.

* Is there a principled way of converting a Haskell Float or Double (or 
Rational, for that matter) to and from IEEE format?

* Since many computers use IEEE format natively, is there a quicker way 
of doing this on those architectures?

Paul.