When creating a CDF, a user has the option of using any of the supported
encodings:
VAX, Sun,
SGi Personal Iris and Power Series, DECstation, DEC Alpha/OSF1,
DEC Alpha/OpenVMS (D_FLOAT and G_FLOAT), IBM RS6000 series,
HP 9000 series, NeXT, IBM PC,
Macintosh, or network (XDR - eXternal Data Representation). The created
CDF may then be copied to any of the supported computers and read by
the CDF library. When a value is read from the CDF, the CDF library may
be requested to decode the value into the encoding of the computer being
used or any of the other encodings (which may be desirable for various
reasons). A CDF with any of the supported encodings may be read from
and written to on any supported computer.