New kind of stream class

Copyright Adam Ward 10 July 2004:
:D
I am thinking about developing a "RunLengthStream", which derives from the normal stream class.

It will basically accept any binary data as input and use run length encoding to compress it into a smaller stream for transfer through systems that would normally represent a data bottleneck.

Has this already been done (would I be wasting my time coding this)?

Is it even a practical possibiliy?

hmm I dont know if it's really worth making a derivated stream class about it. Just create a function that converts and another that unconverts and that uses a regular stream as intput/output and that should be enough