Re^2: Looking for ideas: Converting a binary 'flags' field into something human readable

[locked_user sundialsvc4]

That seems to me to be a “at least fairly genius” suggestion:   to encode the value as the bit-field which it is, but then to document the meaning of the field to the human reader.   (The computer wouldn’t care.)

Promptly upvoted.

The parser-grammar could fairly easily be made to include a descriptor that, one way or another, maps to a (hard-coded) Perl subroutine within the parser ... which generates the comment-entries to describe the field.   (Personally, I think I’d do it as a table, including the starting byte/bit number, the number of bits, and the interpretation.   “ASCII Art” could be unmanageable.)