What are the design points for SCSU?
One of the key design points of SCSU was that it should work with small strings. Starting a new LZW for each string is not efficient; it is probably wasteful. SCSU usually does not need more than one or two bytes overhead, and often 0 bytes to start up. Another design point of SCSU is that it is editable (you can replace a piece in the middle, w/o having to change the stuff at the beginning or the end.) Finally, it was not so much the smallest strings the SCSU designers wanted, but to get pretty much all types of Unicode encoded legacy data to be as compact as in the equivalent legacy encoding. Whether or not these capabilities are important to your overall design, is a different matter, but as long as they are, SCSU is superior to generic algorithms.
