[Haskell-cafe] Re: Abstraction leak

[Andrew Coppin]

apfelmus wrote:
> Am I missing something or why wouldn't
>
>   encode, decode :: String -> String
>   encode = encodeRLE . encodeHuffman
>   decode = decodeHuffman . decodeRLE
>
> do the job? This is probably what Andrew intends to do in his Java
> version. Note that this not only RLE-encodes the Huffman table but also
> (needlessly) the data stream. In case you only want to RLE the table, a
> simple Word32 field tracking the size of the Huffman table should be enough.
>   

It is enough. But given that the whole purpose of compression algorithms 
is to squeeze data into the tiniest possible space, I wanted to avoid 
having a size field. And mathematically it's perfectly possible to do... 
I just can't find a convinient way to do it in Haskell. :-(