Comment by perching_aix

There's a term overload involved. In implementation terms, codec stands for coder/decoder, with "coder" referring exactly to an encoding capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec

So that's a swing and a miss I'm afraid. But I'm very interested to hear what do you think a "coder" library does in this context if not encode, and why is it juxtaposed with "decoder" if not for doing the exact opposite.