Thanks again for the insightful reply !

I haven't looked onto vec() before for this problem, and no one turned my attention to it before you (it seems a quite forgotten feature of Perl, only acouple of mentions in the full index of the popular Perl books). It does seem like help for my problem, and I'll consider using it.

Perhaps I'll eventually create a File::BitStream module, whichever way I'll choose to implement it.