Implementing the PPM data compression scheme

The prediction by partial matching (PPM) data compression algorithm developed by J. Cleary and I. Witten (1984) is capable of very high compression rates, encoding English text in as little as 2.2 b/character. It is shown that the estimates made by Cleary and Witten of the resources required to implement the scheme can be revised to allow for a tractable and useful implementation. In particular, a variant is described that encodes and decodes at over 4 kB/s on a small workstation and operates within a few hundred kilobytes of data space, but still obtains compression of about 2.4 b/character for English text