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 asciiprint "STRING" 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