| Calling Sequence | decompress(compr)
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| Parameters |
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| Return Type | anything | |||||||||
| Synopsis | Compress takes any structure and compresses it in a simple way. The function decompress restores the original expression. Normally this is used in cases that lots of structures are stored in main memory and this would require too much memory and the structures are not used often enough, so that it pays to decompress them before using them. The compression factor is about 3:1 for general structures on a 32-bit word implementation, higher for 64-bit words. | |||||||||
| Examples | > t := compress([1,2,{3,4}]);
t := [1, 2, {3,4}]
> decompress(t); [1, 2, {3,4}]
> size(t)/size([1,2,{3,4}]);
0.2727 | |||||||||
| See also | compress, length, size, system | |||||||||