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I am in the process of developing a special-purpose network tool with some packet sniffing and decoding capabilities. I am looking for languages designed to assist in the dissection/decoding of arbitrary packet formats. Idealy, the solution should be based on open standards. There are related questions on SO, but most deal with the full lifecycle of packet sniffing (I don't care so much about the capture, there are other libraries that do that well). In general, what I'm looking for is a language and supporting framework for the declaritive definition of packet formats and corresponding run-time decoding. Because this problem can be generalized to any non-network binary data, a solution that does this for arbitrary binary streams would also be in scope. I am a little surprised no such standard currently exists in a mature and robust state (at least that I could find) - though there seem to be a lot of interesting but not-quite-right and almost-there projects (see below). Perhaps that speaks to the difficulty of the problem, or maybe to a lack of demand. By way of example, I'm interested in technologies and ideas similar to the following (in no particular order): Packet.Net - Does the job of converting from binary packet representations to structures, but the dissectors are all hard-coded and it doesn't appear to be able to handle more complex formats. DFDL - I've been following this one for a while and was even participating in teleconferences a year or so ago. The standard seems to be reaching maturity, but implementation appears to be challenging. Not that I mind getting my hands dirty, but I'm not sure I've got the resources on this project to implement such a wide-ranging standard from scratch for this purpose. <a href="http://nmpars

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