VLPack, VLBack
For years I've had a variable length encoding technique that I call "vlpack" which is
basically just the well-known variable length quantity encoding for unsigned integers,
with the rare but also known improvement of having the continue bit contribute a +1 to the remaining more significant value bits to eliminate redundancy,
with the unique improvement which I've not seen anyone else do where you realize that the prior improvement means you don't need to mask out the continue bit while decoding/unpacking/"vlbacking", and
with conscious recognition that you can choose a "chunk size", which might be smaller or bigger than the native byte or word size, in which case you also have a choice of "sparse" vs "dense" packing.
For now I mostly just want to anchor the terms and gesture at the idea with a post, so that I can start referring to it in other posts.
