My first language was Perl and its pretty much my native computing tongue. My lack of a firm grounding in C or other lower level language probably hamstrings my understanding of manipulating binary structures (I do, at least, understand what "single-precision float in the native format" means, but it makes my feet itch). This is probably a Good Thing in this case, as I'm scratching my head, along with lots of other people, over what the hell pack is good for and how do you use it? Its just damn unperlish. Perhaps that's in its nature, being that its for converting data from things which are Perl, but we've got to be able to do better. I really can't articulate better than that because I don't really grok the existing pack/unpack and what they're supposed to do. Something about converting binary structures into Perl and vice-versa. But there's got to be a better way. Maybe the docs just need an overhaul. 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. This is *explaination*, not documentation. I don't want details, I want to know the basics of who needs it, what it does, when I should use it and how its used. Once we have this in hand, it may help us to write a better interface. If nothing else, we'll get a perlpacktut man page. -- Michael G Schwern http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ schwern@pobox.com Just Another Stupid Consultant Perl6 Kwalitee Ashuranse If you only hear one song this year there's something terribly wrong with you.Thread Next