[Israel.pm] Working on: extending unpack

[Shmuel Fomberg]

Hi All.

Currently I am not working, but took a three month break from work to 
learn Japanese.
And to make sure I won't get bored, I took a small gig from company 
called Plixer, to extend unpack.
Apparently they do a lot of binary unpacking in their system, and speed 
is very important. (which is why they can't use Data::ParseBinary - it 
is 500 times slower then unpack)
But they need sophisticated operations that unpack does not supply - 
like odd-length integer, (3, 6 and 7 bytes integer) and conditional 
integer. (one byte if smaller then 256, otherwise 255 + two bytes)

So the job was really to rip out unpack from Perl core, stuff it into XS 
module, and add their changes.

Quite interesting.

Shmuel.