[Haskell-cafe] Re: Abstraction leak

[apfelmus]

Andrew Coppin wrote:
> 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. :-(

Well, those 4 bytes won't kill you. But you can of course stop
RLE-decoding as soon as this has read as many bytes as there are in the
Huffman table. A systematic way to do this are parser combinators.

Regards,
apfelmus