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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Data compression (in Ada)
Date: 1996/07/01
Message-ID: <dewar.836270488@schonberg>#1/1
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references: <31D41C54.794BDF32@mailgw.sanders.lockheed.com>
 <4r200g$lh6@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
 <Pine.GSO.3.93.960630081129.9860A-100000@sky.net>
 <4r8jmn$5bq@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-07-01T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Fergus said

">LZW is a good general-purpose compression method though there are times
>when LZW compression actually expands the size instead of reducing it.

This is true of *any* non-lossy compression method."

Well yes, but this is an uninteresting observation, since it is trivial
to limit this increase in size to a single bit (simple proof, use the first
bit in the file to indicate whether or not the remaining bits have been
compressed at all!)