Consider a freight train carrying goods—some big and some small—across the country. Rather than put each item in its own railroad car, the little things are combined and put in one car and then separated at the far end. Compression does much the same thing. Given a set of numbers (some small and some large), you squeeze the small ones together for storage and then take them apart when you need to use them.
This book is built around implementing a delta compression routine. Given a set of N numbers, S i , i = 0, …, N − 1, ...
