From: "Mark Davis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sorry, I read your message too quickly; you are right -- tries are for character lookup, not strings. Tom Emerson of Basis gave a very nice talk on data structures for string lookup at the last UTC; you should contact him.
I see abosolutely no reason why a trie cannot be used for string lookup.
Confusion of language.
Generally, tries perform a lookup on consecutive units of an input string of some sort. As such, they can be designed for variable-length input, e.g. for dicionaries.
Mark is (and I am) most used to working with tries that are optimized for single Unicode code points as input. A 21-bit code point may, for example, be segmented into a "string" of constant length 3, with the first unit from bits 20..10 of the code point, the second unit from bits 9..4, the 3rd from 3..0. This "string" is then looked up. Further, each unit is used to directly access an array instead of performing a search, for best performance. Of course, these particular, specialized tries are not useful for anything but looking up Unicode code points.
markus
