[fpc-pascal]Converting TP Reals in ANSI-C

[Trevor Cooper]

Many examples can be found to demonstrate how to convert the Turbo Pascal 6 
byte Real into IEEE compliant floating point types WITHIN a PASCAL environment.

I need to write routines in ANSI C that can read/write these reals from/to 
a binary file when they are part of variant record type. I am concerned 
that I must also consider word/byte ordering as well as the internal 
representation of the exponent and mantissa.

Has anybody seen and/or does anybody have source code for doing this in ANSI C?

If not, can anybody enlighten me as to exactly how the following record 
should be written to a binary file, particularly the Reals?

Record_Type = (Header_Block, Data_Block);
Data_Record = record case Header_Trailer : Record_Type of
                   Header_Block : ( {variant type 1}
                     NumChan : Integer; {16}
                     Gain : Integer; {0}
                     Freq : Real; {100.0}
                     SampT : Real; {10.0}
                     Ymin : array[0..15] of Real; {0.0}
                     Ymax : array[0..15] of Real; {4095.0}
                     Slope : array[0..15] of Real; {1.0}
                     Intercept : array[0..15] of Real; {0.0}
                     Data_time : LongInt;
                   );
                   Data_Block : ({variant type 2}
                    DataLine : array[0..4095] of Integer; {0-4095 or -9999}
                   );
               end; {record case}

Trevor Cooper
UCSD Division of Physiology