Re:Donald Knuth's 21st Annual Christmas Lecture: Universal C...
by kazinator on Monday December 07, 2015 @09:48PM
(#10694457)
Indeed. This is useful for picking up a transmission in mid-stream at an arbitrary boundary. Or discovering the start of a sector on a disk, as it spins past the read head, spewing whatever bits it finds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefix_code