On 2013-11-03 19:40, Mark Janssen wrote: > But you cheated by using a piece of information from "outside the > system": length. A generic compression algorithm doesn't have this > information beforehand.
By cheating with outside information, you can perfectly compress any one data-set down to 1 bit. Just store the data in the program, then store 1 bit of "is this file the data we have stored in the program?". Granted, in modern OSes, you waste 7 extra bits since they require you to write an entire byte at a time. :-) And with that, you could even have an empty file and test for a file extension. ;-) -tkc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
