Bit order in bit streams

Question

Is there a preferred bit order in the bit stream (where the bit stream is somewhat similar to Java Input / OutputStream, but provides bit level granularity)?

I read that the output of the Huffman stage of the DEFLATE algorithm considers the least significant bit (lsb) of the byte, which must be “before” the most significant bit (msb), in order to encode a non-byte value. Is there a reason for choosing the order of lsb-to-msb rather than the order of msb-to-lsb? For example, does this somehow simplify / speed up the decoding (or coding) of the code?

I assume that the "InputBitStream" class in Java will provide some basic operations:

class InputBitStream {
    // Optimized for reading a SINGLE bit.
    public int readSingleBit() {...}

    // Optimized for reading large segments of bits,
    // not just readSingleBit() -> put in result -> repeat,
    // but if possible, shifting in a byte at a time.
    public int readMultipleBits(int count) {...}
}

DEFLATE bit packing: http://www.gzip.org/zlib/rfc-deflate.html#packing

Answer 1

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