> Would the gains of having enormous shared dictionaries cancel out the advantage of that approach, only in a much more "wasteful" way? It does. The extreme of

> Would the gains of having enormous shared dictionaries cancel out the advantage of that approach, only in a much more "wasteful" way? It does. The extreme of it is storing all information inside pi, as is done here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698852. In the end the dictionary is so big that the indexes themselves start to be too big. If you really had infinite space and immediate access to all digits, there actually could be some way to make it work, though.