But of course there is. Imagine the following compression scheme:
0-253: output the input byte
254 followed by 0: output 254
254 followed by 1: output 255
255: output 10GB of zeroes
Of course this is an artificial example, but theoretically it's perfectly sound. In fact, I think you could get there with static huffman trees supported by some formats, including gzip.
What you suggest is saving the information somewhere else and putting a number to represent it. That is not compression, that is mapping. By using this logic, one can argue that one bit is enough as well.
But of course there is. Imagine the following compression scheme:
Of course this is an artificial example, but theoretically it's perfectly sound. In fact, I think you could get there with static huffman trees supported by some formats, including gzip.
What you suggest is saving the information somewhere else and putting a number to represent it. That is not compression, that is mapping. By using this logic, one can argue that one bit is enough as well.
> 254 followed by 0: output 254
126, surely?