On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 07:35:07AM +1030, Darren Freeman wrote: > What is the goal? > > The representation of the user's data is the goal, as I see it.
There is more than one goal. And adding ugly compression code is a stupid thing to do before considering sensible limitation of the data itself. > Fortunately this thing called source coding allows us to do both: create > an easy to read text file, then store it with an efficiency close to 100 > %. It's not a hack at all, it's called information theory. I see no > reason not to use it here. It's just like creating a water-tight file > format which can be converted to human-readable form, only done the > other way around. I hate binary document files, yes, even when they're just compressed. I don't think it's useful john -- "I will eat a rubber tire to the music of The Flight of the Bumblebee"
