Pat Caudill wrote...
>Well the disks are faster too which I think would be the determing factor 
>in reading from the front of the file. I think a "static" compression 
>scheam would be better. Digital did something like this by taking the N 
>most common owrds in the sources and replacing them with a single 
>character escape code in sources and changes. (I dont remember N.) A 
>better compression scheame might be to use the sources file to build a 
>Huffamn compression tree which is then used unaltered to compress each 
>method starting anew at each one. Some methods would be less compressed 
>than others but it should help. Just a wild idea.

If anyone wants to play with this, check out String>>compressWithTable:.  This is a little routine I wrote to compress a string given, say a table of instVarNames, and sundry other common tokens.  It was only an experiment, but I think it could do pretty well.  Look at its sender, and you'll see it did between 2x and 3x.  Stuffit usually does this well, so presumably it shouldn't be hard to do considerably better.

	- Dan