🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <335@uva.UUCP> freek@uva.UUCP (Freek Wiedijk) writes:
>In article <76000213@uiucdcsp> gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>>But when I benchmarked compress on some digital pictures, I found that
>>stuffit's LZW algorithm is much more efficient than compress's
>>algorithm.  I'm not sure compress is all that great a program.  If you
>
>I thought that unsit used compress to decompress stuffit-files under unix.
>That implies that stuffit and compress use the same LZW-compression, doesn't
>it?
>
>-- 
>Freek Wiedijk  <the pistol major>                  UUCP: uunet!mcvax!uva!freek

From what I understand, Raymond Lau looked at compress (which uses LZW
only) and saw that it was a very good compression algorithm.  But when
he actually implimented it, he discovered that his compression ratios
on MacPaint pictures was much lower than that of PackIt III (which uses 
Huffman encoding).  He then decided to impliment the compression 
algorithms of both programs in his.  That is why StuffIt is backwardly 
compatible with PackIt III, and also how it achieves such good 
compression ratios.  BTW, StuffIt has an LZW only mode also, so it is 
basically compress for the Mac if you use it that way.  As for unsit
using compress, don't ask me, until five days ago, I had never even
heard of unsit!  In reality, I don't think it would use compress, even
though they both use some form of LZW encoding.

-Brad Knowles

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