[Haskell-Cafe] Parsing bytestream

[Stephen Tetley]

I'd use a parser combinator library that has word8 word16, word32
combinators. The latter should really have big and little endian
versions word16be, word16le, word32be, word32le.

Data.Binary should provide this and Attoparsec I think. Usually I roll
my own, but only because I had my own libraries before these two
existed.

The idiom of a tag byte telling you what comes next is very common in
binary formats. It means parsers can avoid backtracking altogether.