Compression Formats

Why bothering supporting all formats, when we can use single turing-complete data format and eval would be a decompressor? Then anyone could use it's own private compression algorithm.

I.e. use Lisp's lambda as compression format, then Lisp's eval would be a decoder. You can store any imaginable data inside lambdas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding)

>>2
But every nontrivial file would just have overhead instead, and it sounds like you're suggesting that the only way to read a file would be to execute it, which would be silly.

Otherwise, why not just do that, and pass around py.lisp instead of my_fucking_pi_digits.txt? _{(The answer is speed, by the way)} It's not like we can't execute arbitrary files on the filesystem whenever we want, or like we can't bundle README files with datasets saying ``this isn't actually the data you want, but at least it's only a few kilobytes!''