I forget where I encountered it, but I've seen similar encodings that eliminated the possibility of many possible encodings for the same number by making the length part of the value.
Values 0-127 are a single byte, but if that first byte has the continuation bit set, not only does that indicate the next byte has 7 more bits to contribute, it also moves the base up to the next window.
10000000 00000000 is the only way to represent 128.
10000000 10000000 00000000 is the only way to represent 16512.
Does this encoding have a name?
According to Wikipedia, git does that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-length_quantity#Remov...
I believe that's how the varint encoding used by protobut works: https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding/#varints
> Drop continuation bits.
Clearly not.
UTF-8?
UTF-8 notoriously doesn't prevent ambiguous encoding by construction, but only prohibiting it in the specs. It's known as overlong encoding. It's up to the encoder/decoder to prevent, correct, or reject it. This burden on the software is exactly what TFA tries to eliminate with the bijou64 format (unfortunately replacing it with another burden: overflow check).
Humber encoding?