Erlang bit syntax

[ghost]

For a systems language it would be nice to imitate Erlang's bit syntax used to construct and pattern match binaries/bitstrings.

http://www.erlang.org/doc/programming_examples/bit_syntax.html
http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/expressions.html#id78511
http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/expressions.html#id79906
http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/data_types.html#id65994

[pcwalton]

I feel as though this should probably be a syntax extension.

[jeltz]

One of the strengths of the Erlang bit syntax is that they can be used for pattern matching to implement a parser. Would this work with a syntax extension?

[thestinger]

This is still unimplemented.

[alexcrichton]

We have binary literals, and I agree that this should be a syntax extension. We also have loadable syntax extensions now, and I'm not sure that this should be included in the standard library by default, so closing.

[ghost]

@alexcrichton given the other crates in rust.git, this doesn't seem out of place to me. Should we move this to an RFC ticket?

[alexcrichton]

One was actually created recently as well!

rust-lang/rfcs#346

[ghost]

Okay, thanks.

[masonforest]

Here's a first pass of a language extension I wrote that allows you to pattern match binaries/bitstrings modeled after Erlang's byte matching functionality: https://crates.io/crates/match_bytes