Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Erlang LZW

I started looking at Erlang some time back.

It's quite an interesting language that implements a number of idioms that are foreign to my OO-based mind, which makes it a good way to give the brain some exercise.

Good Math, Bad Math has had a number of posts relating to it recently, and it was nice to see this one discussing an Erlang implementation of the Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression algorithm.

More years ago than I care to remember, I worked on a C implementation of this for the firmware of a modem that Digital were developing here in Australia.

So, I'm fairly familiar (if somewhat rusty!) on how one codes it in a procedural language. Hence, the article provides a way for me to connect my aging knowledge to this new (to me) language.

I've only partly grokked the details so far, but I'm getting there.

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