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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

LZW is just a (nontrivial and very effective) trick to improve on the early behavior of LZ78; they are both asymptotically optimal.

LZ78 is incredibly simple, elegant AND easy to get your your head around. I had implemented it once in 2 lines of Python. some 25 years ago. If I can shake the rust maybe I'll be able to rederive it.

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It's a bit of a shame that the LZ78-LZW linage of algorithms basically died out at that point.

Most of modern lossless compression is instead based on the LZ77-LZSS-... linage, which has a massive number of different improvements and variations.

  I had implemented it once in 2 lines of Python. some 25 years ago. If I can shake the rust maybe I'll be able to rederive it.

Please do! I would love to see a concise and readable implementation in Python.

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