[Haskell-cafe] Abstraction leak

[Andrew Coppin]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Andrew,
>
> Friday, June 29, 2007, 10:39:28 PM, you wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm writing a whole bunch of data compression programs.
>>     
>
> me too :)  but i never used Haskell for compression itself, only for
> managing archives. fast compression routines are written in C++
>   

What, you're telling me that "fast" software cannot be written in 
Haskell? :-P

Well anyway, speed is not my aim. My aim is to play with various 
textbook algorithms an examine how well they work for various types of 
data. As long as the code isn't *absurdly* slow that'll be just fine.

(I forget who it was, but a while back somebody pointed out the wisdom 
of using Data.Map. It certainly makes the LZW implementation about 400% 
faster! To say nothing of Huffman...)

BTW, how do the pros do Huffman coding? Presumably not by traversing 
trees of pointer-linked nodes to process things 1 bit at a time...