Re: When should a wheel be reinvented

in reply to When should a wheel be reinvented

Man who reinvent wheel knows awful lot about making wheels.

So treat reinvention as a learning exercise.

I'm planning to 'reinvent' a Huffman coding module - I'll learn heaps about the algorithm, and there is plenty of scope for 'improving' it via speed improvement with C and XS, different dictionaries of symbol frequencies, different style interfaces(oo/functional/tied), Apache modules to acts as a deflate/inflate filters, SOAP/.NET interfaces, etc etc

In fact one could use a problem like this to compare the subjective ease/power qualities of a language - how hard is it to do in Perl/Python/LISP/C/.NET/Ruby/BF etc

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#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;use strict;use brain;

Comment on Re: When should a wheel be reinvented

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Re^2: When should a wheel be reinvented by ysth (Canon) on Jun 30, 2004 at 17:49 UTC
May I direct you to Red Perl Part I? BTW, Huffman coding is a lousy (not lossy, lousy) compression technique.	[reply]
Re^3: When should a wheel be reinvented by demerphq (Chancellor) on Jun 30, 2004 at 18:05 UTC
BTW, Huffman coding is a lousy I think I know why you say that, but Id like to know more... Also, it can be fun: A Golf question maybe? Huffman with a twist, New Huffman Obfus, A Brainteaser -- Huffman with a twist, New Huffman Obfus, Huffman encoder, Huffman decoder Actually I solved the "with a twist" problems long ago, and in linear time iirc, but for some reason I never got around to following up on them. Maybe ill dig out the solution and post it now that you have reminded me. --- demerphq _{First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi}	[reply]
Re^4: When should a wheel be reinvented by ysth (Canon) on Jun 30, 2004 at 18:12 UTC
Huffman coding (with a translation table tailored to the data) guarantees the least number of generated bits possible while encoding each character (or whatever the input unit is) separately. But in most data, there is some correlation of each character to the ones around it that can be used to achieve better compression.	[reply]
Re^5: When should a wheel be reinvented by demerphq (Chancellor) on Jun 30, 2004 at 18:17 UTC

In Section Meditations