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From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: compression
Message-ID: <2908@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 19 Jul 89 06:58:07 GMT
References: <2888@ast.cs.vu.nl> <1989Jul18.174647.19537@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 13

In article <1989Jul18.174647.19537@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Andy, I just ran some quick tests using some C-analysis stuff I've got,
>and I doubt that a simple approach will give you more than a factor of 2-3.

If you have measured it, I'm inclined to believe it.  Still, intuitively
I would have thought that with typical tokens being 5 or 6 characters,
one should have gotten more.  I guess too many tokens are of the 1
character variety.

Maybe another approach is standard layout, e.g. 'while (' counts as 1
token.  Even if you write "while(' you get 'while (' on the other end.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)