Appropriate high level language to deal with binary data

Posted by fortran on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by fortran
Published on 2010-04-22T15:43:55Z Indexed on 2010/04/28 22:17 UTC
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binary

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encoding

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parsing

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programming-languages

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language-features

Hi,

I need to write a small tool that parses a textual input and generates some binary encoded data. I would prefer to stay away from C and the like, in favour of a higher level, (optionally) safer, more expressive and faster to develop language.

My language of choice for this kind of tasks usually is Python, but for this case dealing with binary raw data can be problematic if one isn't very careful with the numbers being promoted to bignums, sign extensions and such.

Ideally I would like to have records with named bitfields that are portable to be serialised in a consistent manner.

(I know that there's a strong point in doing it in a language I already master, although it isn't optimal, but I think this could be a good opportunity to learn something new).

Thanks.

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