[r-t] Complexity of extents

[Mark Davies]

RAS writes,

> The problem with that is that most general-purpose
> compression programs (certainly including gzip) don't
> understand a string occuring once forwards and a second
> time backwards, e.g. "abcdefghijihgfedcba".  Clearly that
> string has structure, but gzip doesn't spot it.

That's a good point. Perhaps it would be sensible to concatenate a 
reversed copy of the entire string, and compress the combined entity. 
This ought to produce a higher compression ratio for strings which have 
reversed elements within them.

MBD