[plt-scheme] Weak hash tables

At Thu, 9 Sep 2004 13:41:09 -0700, "Bradd W. Szonye" wrote:
> You normally wouldn't use a
> hash table to create a trie -- it's a lot more work and overhead than
> you really need.

Perhaps surprisingly, I had an opportunity to implement a trie a few
months ago and populated it with a 264k word dictionary. I found it
went about twice as fast if the children were held in a hash-table,
rather than in 26-element array (in mzscheme and I heard from others
that the same was true in Java). I was surprised (I had tried the array
first), but I guess it just reminds us that there are a lot of factors
that go into performance. I have no idea what they are in this case,
tho. :)

Robby