Congress

n 1: the legislature of the US government [syn: {Congress}, {United

States Congress}]

2: a meeting of elected or appointed representatives

3: a national legislative assembly

4: the act of sexual procreation between a man and a woman; the

man's penis is inserted into the woman's vagina and

excited until orgasm and ejaculation occur [syn: {sexual

intercourse}, {intercourse}, {sex act}, {copulation}, {coitus},

{coition}, {sexual congress}, {sexual relation}, {relation},

{carnal knowledge}]

compress

When used without a qualifier, generally refers to

{compression} of a file using a particular {C} implementation

of compression for {Unix} by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods

et al. widely circulated via {Usenet}. compress uses the

{Lempel-Ziv Welch} {algorithm} and normally produces files

with the suffix ".Z".

Compress uses variable length codes. Initially, nine bit

codes are output until they are all used. When this occurs,

ten bit codes are used and so on until an implementation

dependent maximum is reached.

After every 10 kilobytes of input the compression ratio is

checked. If it is descreasing then the entire string table is

discarded and information is collected from scratch.

[{Jargon File}]

(1996-10-20)