>I'm a "results oriented" guy; formal proofs, elegant or otherwise, don't >"float my boat" anywhere near as well as concrete results that I can quantify.
I tend to agree with you; without the time to do an empirical study on compression what do you have? I've never had a compressed file come out larger than the original input. I've heard of others that have, but have never seen it. And, I wrote a Huffman programme in 1977, as part of the same course that introduced me to the theory that we're discussing. And, in the early days of BBS, COMPUSERVE, AOL, and the INTERNET, compression was important due to bandwidth concerns. Just like it was when DASD was expensive. On disk, I only use compression when a file is going to exceed its architectural limit. Using it to save space (or bandwidth) is a waste of time, productivity, and CPU. - I'm a SuperHero with neither powers, nor motivation! Kimota! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
