Hello Martin, Wednesday, December 11, 2002, 2:17:32 PM, you wrote: MD> Came across this in the lambda weblog, where the poster said MD> The Erlang Bit Syntax extends pattern matching to (de)constructing MD> chunks of binary data, such as the bit-encoded headers in network MD> protocols and file formats. It's an amazingly handy language MD> extension. sorry, but ruby don't have pattern matching even for regular data structures. it too FP-style ;) it is not the same as regular expression matching (as you think) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz / integ.ru