Variable-length codes (e.g., Huffman codes) are c o m o n l y employed to minimize the average codeword length for noiseless encoding of discrete sources. Upon transmission over noisy channels, conflictirig views note that such codes "tend to be self-synehronizin? and suffer from the "catastrophic effect of the error's propagation. '' In 1985, lMaxted and Robinson used a state model to describe the error recovery of the decoder. This correspondence extends their results in several ways. effects of channel errors.