On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 01:51:00PM -0700, Keith Rollin wrote: > > > >hmmm... fractional bitfields... > >don't say it too loud... you never know where ANSI C committee members > >are wandering... > > Actually, I think that "fractional bitfields" are used in arithmetic > compression. It's a bit like Huffman in that common characters are > encoded with shorter bit sequences and infrequent characters are > encoded with longer bit sequences, but takes advantage of the fact > that, for optimal encoding, some characters need to be encoded with a > "bit sequence" that is conceptually between two integral bit > sequences.
Yes, I was joking of course. Perhaps the "fractionality" of bit lengths of single characters in arithmetic coding comes from the fact that you are no longer dealing with single character entities actually, but with sequences of characters, depending on their mutual frequencies. So, thinking in terms of characters could be somewhat misleading: maybe "symbols" could be a better choice. Just a guess though, I don't know anything about compression. Marco -- ======================================================================== Marco Pantaleoni [EMAIL PROTECTED] Padova, Italy [EMAIL PROTECTED] elastiC language developer http://www.elasticworld.org -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
