Summary

Binary comprehensions represent a peculiar achievement in language design: they make something inherently low-level (bit manipulation) feel high-level (declarative transformation). This is the sort of abstraction that doesn’t hide complexity so much as organize it in a way that makes sense to human minds, rather like how a filing cabinet doesn’t make papers disappear but does make them findable.

They’re particularly valuable when dealing with data formats designed by committees, transmitted over networks designed by different committees, and processed by systems designed by yet other committees who never spoke to the first two. Which is to say, they’re valuable rather often.