alt Hacker NewsOr you actually do understand it.
You can't just assume smaller is better but it often is. And very often it's more information-dense.
Or you actually do understand it.
You can't just assume smaller is better but it often is. And very often it's more information-dense.
You can compress syntax, losslessly even, with zero understanding of its semantics. Zero understanding not only imbued into the compressor/decompressor, but even the designer of the compressor doesn't require understanding the semantics. Actually, even of the syntax.
A compression program can compress a book written in a language that the author of the program doesn't understand, on a topic he knows little about.