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Task/Bitwise-IO/00-TASK.txt

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+The aim of this task is to write functions (or create a class if your
+language is Object Oriented and you prefer) for reading and writing sequences of
+bits, most significant bit first. While the output of a <tt>asciiprint "STRING"</tt> is the ASCII byte sequence
+"S", "T", "R", "I", "N", "G", the output of a "print" of the bits sequence
+0101011101010 (13 bits) must be 0101011101010; real I/O is performed always
+''quantized'' by byte (avoiding endianness issues and relying on underlying
+buffering for performance), therefore you must obtain as output the bytes
+0101 0111 0101 0'''000''' (bold bits are padding bits), i.e. in hexadecimal 57 50.
+
+As test, you can implement a '''rough''' (e.g. don't care about error handling or
+other issues) compression/decompression program for ASCII sequences
+of bytes, i.e. bytes for which the most significant bit is always unused, so that you can write
+seven bits instead of eight (each 8 bytes of input, we write 7 bytes of output).
+
+These bit oriented I/O functions can be used to implement compressors and
+decompressors; e.g. Dynamic and Static Huffman encodings use variable length
+bits sequences, while LZW (see [[LZW compression]]) use fixed or variable ''words''
+nine (or more) bits long.
+
+* Limits in the maximum number of bits that can be written/read in a single read/write operation are allowed.
+* Errors handling is not mandatory
+<br><br>