Seebs wrote:
> I have a program which listens for UDP packets containing a hunk of data,
> which is a string of binary bits and pieces, such as 3-byte integer values,
> flag bits, and so on.  I can't change the format of the packets.  I have
> some Ruby code which is doing the obvious thing -- taking the byte arrays
> that are returned as string objects by the underlying syscall, and managing
> it using unpack(), etcetera.

Additionally, this usage of strings and unpack can be made more 
palatable with bit-struct and similar libs.