Python Dictionaries: A Data Compression Perspective What is a Python Dictionary? A dictionary is a fundamental data structure in Python. It stores data in key-value pairs. Keys must be immutable (e.g., strings, numbers, tuples). Values can be of any data type. Dictionaries are unordered (before Python 3.7) and mutable. Dictionaries and Data Compression Dictionaries facilitate efficient data representation. They can be used to build symbol tables for encoding/decoding in compression algorithms. Representing frequent data with shorter keys saves space. Key-value pairs can map original data to compressed representations. Example: Huffman Coding with Dictionaries Create a dictionary mapping characters to their Huffman codes. { 'A': '00', 'B': '01', 'C': '10', 'D': '11'} Use this dictionary to encode a string. Decode using the same dictionary, reversing the mapping. Example: Run-Length Encoding (RL...