On 10/11/05, Andreas S. <usenet / andreas-s.net> wrote:
> Matthew Smillie wrote:
> > On Nov 9, 2005, at 8:32, Robert Klemme wrote:
> >
> >>> Symbols are never garbage-collected, so you should not use them for
> >>> situations where you could have an unbounded number of unique
> >>> symbol values.
> >>
> >>
> >> That's why I recommended to use them with a limited set of values  only.
> >>
> >> Hope that makes things a bit clearer.
> >
> >
> > I wonder if I could trouble the list a bit further on this one: I've
> > got a collection of newswire articles, and I was thinking of using
> > symbols to represent the words in each.
>
> Why don't you use a proper compression method like gzip?
>
>

IIUC, he does not want to compress the articles, but to do linguistic
analysis on the text.

brian

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