Previous: Serial Ports, Up: Processes  37.20 Packing and
Unpacking Byte Arrays  This section describes how to pack and
unpack arrays of bytes, usually for binary network protocols.
These functions convert byte arrays to alists, and vice versa.
The byte array can be represented as a unibyte string or as a
vector of integers, while the alist associates symbols either
with fixed-size objects or with recursive sub-alists. To use the
functions referred to in this section, load the bindat library.
Conversion from byte arrays to nested alists is also known as
deserializing or unpacking, while going in the opposite
direction is also known as serializing or packing.