[joshspankit]

Through this thread I really feel like I’m missing something.

Are we not talking about writing binary files that conform to the spec?

Like, in the case of a GIF: simply writing valid garbage data should produce a file that presents as a valid GIF with noise for the image. Similarly: reading the file through the parser and writing it out unmodified should create an identical file (assuming no stenography).

Right?

[IceDane]

You're right. The person saying this would be a breakthrough doesn't understand what this is doing.

There are already similarly declarative tools which can accomplish this. Haskell has binary parsing libraries which work similarly and give you both reading and writing capabilities.

[spullara]

I honestly don't get it either. The inverse of the read spec is the write spec. My guess having not dug deeply is that they don't distinguish between required and optional fields, that said, they should still be able to write what they have based on the read spec but could potentially be still an invalid file.