Touché!

(Removed the "Almost :)" which was added in the light of Monk::Thomas' post; before he added the bit about downloading it wrong.)

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With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

I'm with torvalds on this Agile (and TDD) debunked I told'em LLVM was the way to go. But did they listen!

% perl flag_compress.pl  
           sideways |ompressed
             up |lse | deleted
          down |            bar |
                           | that
[download]

Hmm. Looks quite strange. But I like the idea to try to keep all annotations on the same line and if that is not possible create a new line:

    flags1 => 0b0100110000100000101000000000100000000000000101000000000000001111;
#                | compressed   | other     | and another  |foo             | up
#                   | deleted                                | bar           | down 
#                    | this       | something else                            | charm
#                         | that                                               | strange

Thanks!

Update

Downloaded the code via wget using the download link. Output looks a lot better after converting from DOS to UNIX file format.

use strict;
use warnings;

my @labels = ({label=>'compressed',start=>3}, {label=>'deleted',start=
+>6},
              {label=>'this',start=>7}, {label=>'that',start=>12},
              {label=>'other',start=>18}, {label=>'something else',sta
+rt=>20},
              {label=>'and another',start=>30}, {label=>'foo',start=>4
+5},
              {label=>'bar',start=>47}, {label=>'up',start=>63},
              {label=>'down',start=>64}, {label=>'sideways',start=>65}
+);
print "0b0x00xx0000x00000x0x000000000x00000000000000x0x000000000000000
+xxx\n";

my (@lines);
# for each label
LOOP: foreach my $lab (@labels) {
  # look thru the available lines
  foreach my $line (@lines) {
    my $delta = $lab->{start} - length($line);
    # for a line shorter than start
    if ($delta >= 0) {
      # and tack the label on there
      $line .= ' ' x $delta . '|' . $lab->{label};
      next LOOP;
    }
    # or fit into empty space on existing line
    my $len = length($lab->{label}) + 1;
    if (substr($line, $lab->{start}, $len) eq ' ' x $len) {
      substr($line, $lab->{start}, $len,'|' . $lab->{label});
      next LOOP;
    }
  }
  # or create a new line if needed
  push @lines, ' ' x $lab->{start} . '|' . $lab->{label};
}

print "$_\n" for @lines;
[download]

UPDATE: added comments, added fitting new label into blank space, improved flow