Re: LZ: Compression program

Subject: Re: LZ: Compression program
From: barrym <barrym@neosoft.com>
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 1996 10:45:19 -0500 (CDT)
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960907060641.006da310@mail.rain.org>

On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, Scott J. Rein wrote:

> Yes, unfortunately you can't exactly "plug" a program into ZShell.  It would
> have to be in version 5.0 or so.  Your idea, though, is what I am going to
> _try_ to write.  Just a shell to run the programs compressed on the calculator.
> In other words, you compress them on the computer, send it as one BIG zipped
> file (of course you also need the decompressor and zshell), and then you run 
> the decompressor and it will "on the fly" decompress and run the program.  You
> will need some temporary space on the calculator, but if the compression is as
> much as I hope it will be, that won't be a problem.

I'd like to suggest that you look at some of the public domain
compression programs for the pc that are availble and test the
various algorithms against some zshell programs on the pc to get
some idea of how much compression you really can expect.  Then,
using that information, do a serious survey of the users here
asking them if, given that much compression and the size of the
program, would they use it?

Also, there are a lot of very fancy and highly effective
compression routines today but most of them are quite a bit
larger and more difficult to code.  I would look real close
at them before considering them over the older, smaller
methods that don't compress as much but are several times
smaller.

Barry

References:

Re: LZ: Compression program

From: Scott J. Rein <srein@rain.org>