September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
548 pages
12h 25m
English
Content preview from Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition
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The Bit Syntax
The bit syntax is a notation used for extracting and packing individual bits or sequences of bits in binary data. When you’re writing low-level code to pack and unpack binary data at a bit level, you’ll find the bit syntax incredibly useful. The bit syntax was developed for protocol programming (something that Erlang excels at) and produces highly efficient code for manipulating binary data.
Suppose we have three variables—X, Y, and
Z—that we want to pack into a 16-bit memory area.
X should take 3 bits in the result, Y should take
7 bits, and Z should take 6. In most languages this
involves some messy low-level operations involving bit shifting
and masking. In Erlang, we just write the following:
| | M = <<X:3, Y:7, Z:6>> |
This ...
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