Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT Best way to compress files with digits

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 4:25 PM, Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> You're cheating.  The algorithm you tested will compress strings of
> arbitrary 8-bit values.  The algorithm you proposed will only compress
> strings of bytes where each byte can have only one of 10 values.
>

Of course.  I wasn't expecting the general-purpose algorithm to do as
well.  In some sense, part of the information that is being encoded is
actually in the compression algorithm itself (the mapping), while in a
general-purpose compression algorithm that information has to be part
of the compressed data stream.

I was just expecting gzip/etc to get much closer to the theoretical
limit.  I figured that it might be a few percent higher, but I wasn't
expecting a 10+% difference.

--
Rich