I wouldn't really call it a "hack", rather an instance of a standard way of producing variable length codes, namely a prefix code [1]. That it was also made to

I wouldn't really call it a "hack", rather an instance of a standard way of producing variable length codes, namely a prefix code [1]. That it was also made to be self-synchronizing is of course neat, but again, as a hack I would rather describe some one-off thing rather than applications of well known concepts to solve a problem they were designed to solve. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefix_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefix_codes