Compressing computer programs
Citation
Export citationDavies, R. M., & Witten, I. H. (1993). Compressing computer programs (Computer Science Working Papers 93/7). Hamilton, New Zealand: Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato.
Permanent Research Commons link: https://hdl.handle.net/10289/9924
Abstract
This paper describes a scheme for compressing programs written in a particular programming language—which can be any language that has a formal lexical and syntactic description—in such a way that they can be reproduced exactly. Only syntactically correct programs can be compressed. The scheme is illustrated on the Pascal language, and compression results are given for a corpus of Pascal programs; but it is by no means restricted to Pascal. In fact, we discuss how a "compressor-generator" program can be constructed that creates a compressor automatically from a formal specification of a programming language, in much the same way as a parser generator creates a syntactic parser from a formal language description.
Date
1993Type
Report No.
93/7
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato
Rights
© 1993 by Rod M. Davies & Ian H. Witten
Collections
- 1993 Working Papers [12]