My algorithms teacher (3rd year paper) mentioned them when doing a few lectures on information theory, data compression and encoding, then set an assignment on

My algorithms teacher (3rd year paper) mentioned them when doing a few lectures on information theory, data compression and encoding, then set an assignment on implementing LZW or LZ78 with a bit-packer (and the inverse). The spec allowed you to either compress via bytes or nibbles. That was last year, I also got the impression that he liked to fill likely gaps that he could do with small detours.