I agree with this. The key question is whether any additional information is stored in the file name, lengths, number of files, etc.
If you could hold 400 bytes of executable code in memory without any additional information, feed it 599 bytes of memory and it outputs 1000 bytes - that's compression.
Anything else is just an abstraction around this.
His solution does not work because he is storing extra information in the lengths of the files, i.e., where to split the files and write a "5" byte. Preserving this in memory would require extra storage.
This has been done! You can use the BARF utility to compress any file by at least one byte... assuming your filesystem allows filenames long enough to handle the encoding :) http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/barf.html
If you could hold 400 bytes of executable code in memory without any additional information, feed it 599 bytes of memory and it outputs 1000 bytes - that's compression.
Anything else is just an abstraction around this.
His solution does not work because he is storing extra information in the lengths of the files, i.e., where to split the files and write a "5" byte. Preserving this in memory would require extra storage.