I would love to see a Python (or Haskell) implementation of gzip (and others) that is optimized for: * readability and * introspection rather than speed and

I would love to see a Python (or Haskell) implementation of gzip (and others) that is optimized for: * readability and * introspection rather than speed and memory usage. That way, you could step into every primitive, and see intermediate results in a human-readable representation (as provided by the programming language). Encoding that stuff to binary would always happen in a separate step. That way, those compression algorithms, with all details, would be easier to learn and to understand. Also, development of new, customized compression schemes would be a lot easier than it is today, where you either have to take existing ones, or have to start from scratch. A custom implementation might be as simple as a rearrangement and recombination of existing building blocks, or may introduce completely new (possibly domain specific) building blocks.