New PACKSEG Implementation For The Workshop

[AlexTheCat123]

It's also a pretty interesting algorithm: It's likely that some statistical analysis could produce a rather good 256-element compression table, given the regularity of the Pascal compiler's (relatively unsophisticated) code generation and the regularity of the 68K instruction set.

Ha, I've actually thought about doing this a couple of times! The only reason I haven't (aside from being busy with the LisaFPGA project) is because then the new packtable would be incompatible with all existing installations of LOS; you'd have to repack everything in order to use it. I know that might be a bit of a dumb objection since the kinds of people who would know how to copy over a new packtable would also know how to repack the OS files, but it just bugs me that you wouldn't be able to overwrite an existing SYSTEM.UNPACK without repacking things.

I wonder how they came up with the packtable that shipped with LOS? I'm guesing they analyzed earlier versions of the OS (or maybe the Monitor) and just threw the most commonly-occurring words in there?