DOS International was a German magazine in the early nineties with excellent technical explanations and program listings. One of them was a super compressor that used your recursive technique. I didn't quite understand the details that were given in the description of the algorithm (I blamed my mediocre understanding of German), but it sounded legit.

So I spent a good hour to type in a page of impossible to follow C code with obscure numbers in lookup tables and all it did when I ran the program was to print out "April 1., April 1.".