rcollyer

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the conversion from (ab|ac) to (a(b|c)) essentially a conversion to a [Trie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie)? There's Leonid's mma [version](http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/5394/52) which might be adapted to this; the...

Right, definitely not minimal, but smaller. Merging the suffixes (`Function` is a good one), in addition to compressing non-branching portions of the tree while not likely to be minimal, may...