Let's say we want to take patterns of two characters and replace them with a single-byte flag to compress a code file of any language.
With about 95 unique symbols in total, we use the combination formula to get the total number of possible tokens: C = 95! / ( 2!(95-2)! ) = 4,465. Divide that by 255 -- the maximum number of unique int values a single byte can store -- and we have the worst compression algorithm I've ever designed.
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