Talk:Burrows–Wheeler transform: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:11, 7 May 2025

Revision as of 09:19, 7 May 2025

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Technically, BWT is not a '''compression'''. Should it be noted? It leads to wrong understanding of the subject —[[User:Metalim|lim]] 16:54, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

:I agree that this is confusing. What's more, it doesn't seem that this illogical terminology is actually used in the field; it's a confusion specific to this Wikipedia article. "Block-sorting compression" or "Block Sorting Lossless Data Compression Algorithm" refers to a compression algorithm of which the BWT is ''one of several steps'' (albeit the only one that was a novel new idea when BSLDCA was published); it's ''not'' synonymous with BWT as we claim here.

:It makes sense for these compression-related terms to be bolded in the article and to redirect to it, especially since the original paper by Burrows and Wheeler was literally titled "A Block-sorting Lossless Data Compression Algorithm" - but we shouldn't conflate that compression algorithm with what people now call BWT, which is just the reordering of characters without any actual compression step.

:I'll have a go at fixing it. [[User:ExplodingCabbage|ExplodingCabbage]] ([[User talk:ExplodingCabbage|talk]]) 09:19, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

== Bad inefficiency in the example implementation ==