Manipulating binary data with Lua

Purpose: discuss ways to manipulate binary data

As described in the Lua Technical Note 003 [1], there are situations where one wants to deal with raw byte buffers.

John Belmonte proposes modeling such functionality on the Perl pack/unpack approach [2].

Every scripting language seems to have its own design, Tcl has binary, while Python has struct, for example.

It would be nice if the extension created for Lua were able to subsume all of these designs, so that one day one might consider using Lua to manage this task (see Embedding Lua in other languages). Pack/unpack is no rocket science, a single implementation might reduce the amount of duplication. Though it'll be yet another implementation until others adopt it...