The encoded-byte block will almost certainly be unusable as an indexed
data-structure, although it depends on how clever you are encoding the block.
Indexing the encoded-byte block will require an auxiliary array to translate
from a word index to (at least) the starting index of the word in the
encoded-byte block. With 100,000 or so words and a three-byte index per word,
the auxiliary array costs 300,000 bytes.
This page last modified on 2006 January 24.