On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Michael Neumann wrote:

> bzip2 uses BWT (I don't recall what that stands for).
> You can use BWT in combination with RLE which results in 
> better compression as RLE alone.
> 
BWT is Burrows-Wheeler transform.

> I've implemented BWT some time ago in Ruby, but the whole program
> including RLE was about 100 lines of code.
> 
> If you're interested I'll send you the sourcecode.
>  
I'd be interested; please send it to me.

BTW, maybe we should agree on a base class for compression algorithms so
that we can start collecting them into a lib? Anyone got a sensible
OO design for compression?

> Another way could be to use what I call "bit table" compression,
> where I generate an array of the most frequently used characters
> and compress the whole data with a reduced bit-size (e.g. 5 bit). 
> 
Sounds like Huffman-coding to me?

Regards,

Robert