Standards Update, IEEE 1003.2: Shell and Utilities

[Dan Bernstein]

Submitted-by: brnstnd at KRAMDEN.ACF.NYU.EDU (Dan Bernstein)

In article <1991Jun12.034606.16284 at uunet.uu.net> pc at hillside.co.uk (Peter Collinson) writes:
> The group is also looking for a new family of compression utilities,
> now that the Lempel-Ziv-Welch family of commands have been removed
> from the standard.  The main requirements for a substitute are:
>    o The algorithm should be expressed (expressible) in a
>      language independent form
>    o The algorithm should be free of patent issues

My compression method, Y coding, appears to be free of all patents,
including LZW. There's nothing language-dependent about the method or
current file format. My reference implementation, yabbawhap (see
comp.sources.unix volume 24), works on a variety of UNIX and non-UNIX
systems, and produces better results than compress at reasonable speed.

Another possibility is Ross Williams' LZRW1, which produces worse
results than compress but is blindingly fast.

---Dan


Volume-Number: Volume 24, Number 9