Today around 12:32pm, Sam Tregar hammered out this masterpiece:
: On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Michael G Schwern wrote:
:
: > Perhaps someone could attempt to write an explaination of pack and
: > unpack in completely Perl terms. No bits, no ints, no nybbles, no
: > IEEE floating point arithmetic, no prior knowledge of C necessary.
: > Those are not Perl. Scalars, arrays, hashes, functions, methods,
: > loops, contexts. These are Perl.
:
: "Describe to me how you use a supermarket shopping-cart in terms of a
: hardware store. Don't mention any words for food. Just talk about nuts
: and bolts."
:
: You've pretty much nailed the primary use of pack/unpack - bridging the
: gap between scalars and the various binary formats of Le Monde Cyber.
:
: I used pack recently in order to get Perl talking with Glimpse, a search
: engine written in C. For some bizare reason the Glimpse server won't talk
: to you unless you send your PID to it. As if that weren't strange enough,
: it needs your PID split into 4 bytes in reverse order. If you can think
: of a better solution to this problem than pack then by all means propose
: it. I think pack is pretty good at what it does!
:
: Maybe you don't get to know how good it is until you need it?
I think pack/unpack are perlish enough. Especially if we believe that
printf/sprintf are perlish.
An example:
Take a MySQL time stamp ( $ts = '20000918123847' ) and 'unpack' it into an
array and print in in a pretty manner.
printf(
"%4d/%02d/%02d %02d:%02d%02d\n",
unpack( 'A4A2A2A2A2A2', '20000918123847' )
);
If printf is perlish, so is unpack, IMHO ;-)
--
print(join(' ', qw(Casey R. Tweten)));my $sig={mail=>'[EMAIL PROTECTED]',site=>
'http://home.kiski.net/~crt'};print "\n",'.'x(length($sig->{site})+6),"\n";
print map{$_.': '.$sig->{$_}."\n"}sort{$sig->{$a}cmp$sig->{$b}}keys%{$sig};
my $VERSION = '0.01'; #'patched' by Jerrad Pierce <belg4mit at MIT dot EDU>
