Status Page Dll's --My Status :)

[Gregory M. Turner]

On Tuesday 17 June 2003 12:43 am, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Gregory M. Turner wrote:
> >But encoding is inherently harder to implement than
> >decoding (there's a lot more "to do", and usually no single right answer,
> > so you never know when you're done).
>
> Ah?
>
> Every book, software and piece of common knowledge tells me that
> decoding is WAY more difficult. "Be restrictive in what you produce, and
> permissive in what you accept" means that, when decoding, you need to
> accept broken encodings too, as well as encodings that took a different
> path than the one you would take (different algorithm, different
> paramters, optional parameters, etc). When encoding, you need to select
> a single path and go that way.

Hmm, that's a good point, I never thought of it that way.  I guess I was 
thinking in terms of computational complexity, but from a 
difficulty-of-implementation perspective (which is what I was intending to 
address), I think you are right, I have it backwards above.  In this 
particular case, however, the fact that the decompression code was gifted to 
us probably nevertheless reverses the relative labor requirements we would 
expect based on that principle.

-- 
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant
 that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
 -- Thomas Sowell

gmt