Advantages
The advantage of a variable-length code is that unlikely source symbols can be assigned longer codewords and likely source symbols can be assigned shorter codewords, thus giving a low expected codeword length. For the above example, if the probabilities of (a, b, c, d) were, the expected number of bits used to represent a source symbol using the code above would be:
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As the entropy of this source is 1.7500 bits per symbol, this code compresses the source as much as possible so that the source can be recovered with zero error.
Read more about this topic: Variable-length Code
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