Certified, total serialisers with an application to Huffman encoding

Abstract

The other day, I was assembling lecture material for a course on Agda. Pursuing an application-driven approach, I was looking for correctness proofs of popular algorithms. One of my all-time favourites is Huffman data compression (Huffman, 1952). Even though it is probably safe to assume that you are familiar with this algorithmic gem, a brief reminder of the essential idea may not be amiss.