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Programming with Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)

External Data Representation

RPC uses External Data Representation (XDR), a protocol for the machine-independent description and encoding of data. XDR is useful for transferring data between different computer architectures.

RPC can handle arbitrary data structures, regardless of different machines' byte orders or structure layout conventions, by always converting them to XDR representation before sending them over the wire. The process of converting from a particular machine representation to XDR format is called serializing, and the reverse process is called deserializing. For a detailed discussion of XDR, see ``XDR/RPC protocol specification''.


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