Matthew T. Russotto wrote:
In article <45f5b54c$0$14129$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net>, Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com> wrote:(Theoretically, you could try changing those 8,881 carriage returns to line feeds until you successfully unpacked the archive. This is computationally infeasible, since it amounts to testing all valid combinations of an 8881-bit number.)It's probably possible to reduce it to a linear problem rather than an exponential, but I'm not volunteering to examine all 8881 CRs to determine if it's supposed to be an LF.
You make a very interesting point. If there is internal redundancy of any useful kind in a ShrinkIt archive, then one could guess at the smaller number of LF/CR choices prior to the first checkable point, then progress to those between there and the next checkable point, etc. This process could be part of an automatic recovery scheme. Andy, is there any way of telling early when a decompression is running off the rails? -michael NadaNet networking for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."