[wwader]

Interesting post! when prototyping what would end up being fq i did quite a lot of tinkering with how it could work by splitting it up into multiple tools, and use it like: <decode tool> | <query tool> | <display tool>. Never got it to feel very neat and problem is what would be piped? i tried JSON so that <query tool> could jq but whatever is would be would have to be quite verbose to be able for <display tool> to be able to show hexdump dumps, value mappings, descriptions etc. So in the end i ended up doing more or less the same design but in jq where the values piped between filters is kind of a "polymorphic" JSON values. Those behave behave like JSON value but can be queried for which bit range and buffer they originate from or if the value is symbolic representation, description etc. Maybe an interesting note about fq is that for format like msgpack it kinds of can decode in two modes, by default it decodes msgpack into like a "meta"-mode where things like integer encoding, sizes etc can be seen and then there is another "representation"-mode that is JSON value of what it represents.