One of the mantras I used when I was a programming instructor was "How can you know what to tell the computer to do, if you can't do it yourself?" This is a great example of that.<p><i>Don’t forget that the huffman codes are packed LSB to MSB, but are to be interpreted as an integer in big endian format. Why this insanity?</i><p>Because that's what Phil Katz did. I vaguely remember reading about that years ago, and believe it had to do with how he implemented it; not as canonical table lookup, but as explicit tree-walking, since the former hadn't really been invented yet and the latter would fit within the memory constraints of a 16-bit system (DOS on a PC).