Author: Stan Eisenstat
Subject: Re: [Cs323] Stopping pruning
Date: Monday, 09 Nov 2020, 16:32:32

    > Message Posted By: Unknown
    >
    > Should we ever stop pruning? My intuition is that if every code in the
    > table (except the last) is a prefix of some other code, pruning is
    > inefficient, and so after that we should just stop adding codes to the table.

No, encode and decode should never stop pruning.

Yes, the situation you describe can occur, but it is
exceedingly rare.  Thus while It would be easy to add
code to turn off pruning if only one code is removed,
it is not worth including this requirement in the
specification.

--Stan-