Variable-Length Bit-Level Encoding

[Era Scarecrow via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Saturday, 12 November 2016 at 19:13:13 UTC, Nordlöw wrote:
> 0 => [0]
> 1 => [1,0]
> 2 => [1,1,0]
>
> is easy but assumes a too extreme input value distribution.
>
> Does anybody have a suggestion for an encoder that is more 
> suitable for real-world values that are, for instance, normally 
> distributed?

  Hmm off hand I'm recalling there's a different encoding that 
uses 0's to determine how long the encoding is, and then the 
first 1 breaks it off to the actual encoding. Great for short 
ints.

  1 = 0
  010 = 1
  011 = 2
  00101 = 4
  000011111 = 30

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential-Golomb_coding

  If you know the range of the data, I'd almost be more inclined 
to do range encoding mixed with arithmetic coding.