Re: io.format (was: Reported to the Bloat Police: string.pack, .unpack and .packsize!)

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Philipp Janda once stated:
> 
> Regarding string (un)packing: I don't know whether there are preexisting 
> and familiar languages for this (other than Roberto's struct library). 
> However, I think that a "preview" with a strong resemblance to the final 
> result makes sense there as well. I haven't used Lua's string 
> (un)packing yet, so I can't say how good the resemblance really is.

  Perl has pack(), which works similarly to Lua's pack() only waaaaaay more
options.  Erlang has actual language syntax to do byte/bit packing, but
supporting that would require changing Lua itself, or using LPeg.

  -spc