From: Hugh Sasse <hgs@...>
Date: 2005-11-01T19:55:56+09:00
Subject: Re: TumbleDRYer (#53) - my solution

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Dale Martenson wrote:

> For readability, I left the binary encoding as strings rather than
> converting them to integers. This could easily be accomplished by
> prefixing the encoding with '0b' and using String::to_i(0) to do the
> conversion to an integer. This would be important if you wished to use
> this as a compression technique.

Yes, you could assemble the whole lot and use pack for that.  It was
a nice approach.  I think the problem with coding methods like the
one I used is getting the code words mapped to meaningful names so
one can still read the code.  That would be beyond the scope of a
quiz though, I expect, because it would involve advanced natural
language programming to come up with the short concept names for the
code words.

I liked the Huffman coder.  I have usually ducked out of using
Huffman coders because of managing all the tree rearrangement and
construction, but your code is very clear.  I've usually used
Shannon-Fano code for such things in the past, though it is a little
less efficient (in terms of the codes it produces), because you only
sort the list of code words once.  

Since the quiz is about reducing repetition in code: I think you
could probably use a superclass for the Internal and Leaf nodes to
hold common instance vars.

Thank you.  I wonder if anyone else will have a go?
        Hugh