Application of Splay Trees to Data Compression, CACM Aug. 1988

[Douglas Jones]

On Aug. 8, 1988, I advertised a UNIX utility based on the data compression
scheme I described in the August '88 issue of Communications of the ACM.
This utility is patterned after the BSD compress command, and it compresses
about as well (sometimes better, sometimes worse, but never as fast); this
utility can also be used for encryption, although the degree of security it
offers is still unknown.

I have found a small number of bugs in the original distribution, and have
a repaired version available; again, the code is free to anyone in a research
setting.

The bugs, incidentally, were found by the stronger than usual type checking
and variable use reporting of the hc compiler on the IBM RT; all bugs were
in the area of command line parsing and error reporting, none had any
effect on the normal functioning of the program.

				Douglas W. Jones
				jones at herky.cs.uiowa.edu