Minimum expected length of fixed-to-variable lossless compression without prefix constraints

The minimum expected length for fixed-to-variable length encoding of an n -block memoryless source with entropy H grows as n H + O(1), where the term O(1) lies between 0 and 1. However, this well-known performance is obtained under the implicit constraint that the code assigned to the whole n-block is a prefix code. Dropping the prefix constraint, which is rarely necessary at the block level, we show that the minimum expected length for a finite-alphabet memoryless source with known distribution grows as n H - 1\2 log n +O(1) unless the source is equiprobable. We also refine this result up to o(1) for those memoryless sources whose log probabilities do not reside on a lattice.