> Note that even though the goal, and end result, is that the file is smaller, this is not a compression scheme, since it only works when your values are distri

> Note that even though the goal, and end result, is that the file is smaller, this is not a compression scheme, since it only works when your values are distributed in one particular way This statement doesn't sound right. I think he's trying to say it's not a general purpose compression scheme, but every compression scheme only works on certain patterns. In fact, most possible streams of bytes are not compressible at all. Even the general purpose approaches only work on very specific types of inputs (such as natural language) which contain a lot of redundancy.