Yes but that's exactly what I meant. ASCII wastes 1 bit by character (the 8th bit isn't used). What if the source was encoded in such a way that it is "contrac

Yes but that's exactly what I meant. ASCII wastes 1 bit by character (the 8th bit isn't used). What if the source was encoded in such a way that it is "contracted" (the unused bit of the first character is the first bit of the second character, etc). Sorry for the 3 days late reply. The decoding function would have to be very small to make it worth it though.