<cite> I was wondering if it could be the case to rewrite the decoder using some "standard" parsing methods, like Parse::RecDescent, Parse::Yapp or even bison. The fact that I didn't so far is a clear, altough implicit, signal that I actually don't know much of all of these tools except their names and existence. So my first question is: are these tools good to parse binary data, whose format is structured in a nearly-compressed form? </cite>
I think you could definitly use them, if you can transform the MMS-Specs into EBNF-Form (which should be easy), but you will need a lexer to feed your parser with tokens, the parsers don't read your (compressed etc.) data by themself. The process normally looks like:
DATA -> (lex) -> TOKENS -> (yacc) -> SYNTAX TREE / DATA IN NEW FORMAT