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Use of formal protocol description techniques and code generation can reduce bugs in network packet parsing code. However, such techniques are themselves complex, and don't see wide adoption in the protocol standards development community, where the focus is on consensus building and human-readable specifications. We explore the utility and e ectiveness of new techniques for describing protocol data, specifically designed to integrate with the standards development process, and discuss how they can be used to generate code that is safer and more trustworthy, while maintaining correctness and performance.