Ok, although its off-topic, but I would like to ask what VladimirF did, in a different way.

Consider this.

Value: 12345.54321

Now, you don't have to have a Ph.D in maths to figure out that how much size it will take as a string and as a float. In real time application, suppose if you have a tight loop, now before sending, you may convert, any no. of values to a string, then you make a big string, that holds all of them, offcourse sepereated by some delimiter, and then put it on the line.

Putting bandwidth consumption issue aside, when you get the string at the other end, you tokenize it, then get the initial tokes to figureout what was followed in the string and then now you perform the coutner part, convert back strings to integers/floats etc.

Depending upon the volume of data being transfered, the performance of the application and bandwidth consumption will be high. Now, you may say...But who cares, if its working then its acceptable...just get the **** job done.

Well, this is something very serious, this thing will always be a real pain in neck and if you have developed few applications based upon this design, then under normal conditions, with small data transfer, you may not notice much difference, but when this volume will increase, your sufisticated hardware won't be able to help you much and then you may not be able to replace it either, because it involves alot of risk.

There can be other intelligent ways to optimize it, so that performance and bandwidth consumption don't get compormized, but I won't suggest this solution, unless this is the last thing on earth to live with. Just my 2 cents (hmmm, my be 4...hmm....no 1....**** whatever)