comprise

v 1: be composed of; "The land he conquered comprised several

provinces" [syn: {consist of}, {consist in}]

2: include or contain; have as a component; "A totally new idea

is comprised in this paper"; "The record contains many old

songs from the 1930's" [syn: {incorporate}, {contain}]

3: form or compose; "This money is my only income"; "The stone

wall was the backdrop for the performance"; "These

constitute my entire belonging"; "The children made up the

chorus"; "This sum represents my entire income for a

year"; "These few men comprise his entire army" [syn: {constitute},

{represent}, {make up}, {be}]

compress

When used without a qualifier, generally refers to

{compression} of a file using a particular {C} implementation

of compression for {Unix} by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods

et al. widely circulated via {Usenet}. compress uses the

{Lempel-Ziv Welch} {algorithm} and normally produces files

with the suffix ".Z".

Compress uses variable length codes. Initially, nine bit

codes are output until they are all used. When this occurs,

ten bit codes are used and so on until an implementation

dependent maximum is reached.

After every 10 kilobytes of input the compression ratio is

checked. If it is descreasing then the entire string table is

discarded and information is collected from scratch.

[{Jargon File}]

(1996-10-20)