Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
> Is this the best way to do mixed alpha and binary or can anyone suggest
> better ways to pass context info, for example like in headers or to map XML
> like structures to Binary or a way to detect and translate what is a string
> and what is a number in a byteArray?

ASN.1 with BER/PER/DER? While a full ASN.1 implementation for Squeak
would be nice ;-) , a custom codec that simply makes use of ASN.1 rules
will probably get the job done for you... and you get a nice
well-understood description of your data structure as documentation, as
well.

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com17/languages/X.680-0207.pdf
http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com17/languages/X.690-0207.pdf
http://www.iana.org/assignments/enterprise-numbers