References

If you must use a binary format, you can improve portability, and perhaps take advantage of prewritten I/O libraries, by making use of standardized formats such as Sun's XDR (RFC 1014), OSI's ASN.1 (referenced in CCITT X.409 and ISO 8825 "Basic Encoding Rules"), CDF, netCDF, or HDF. See also questions 2.12 and 12.38.

-- comp.lang.c Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ List)

Perl modules NetCDF and PDL::NetCDF

RFC 1832  XDR: External Data Representation Standard
http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1832.txt
RFC 971 A SURVEY OF DATA REPRESENTATION STANDARDS
http://www.java.sun.com/products/jdk/rmi/doc/serial-spec/protocol.doc.html
Python's pickle.py
ObjC?'s serialization (similar to pickle, tho)
WDDX http://www.wddx.org/
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-low-sdr-00.txt
   This document describes a human-readable, textual syntax for
   representing self-describing structured data. This representation
   was designed as a transfer syntax for loosely-coupled distributed
   applications where one cannot depend on sender(s) and receiver(s)
   sharing a schema for exchanged data. The syntax is compact,
   expressive, intuitive, and simple to implement.