Re:String Interning – Trie vs. Hash Table Deathmatch
by kazinator on Monday June 29, 2015 @05:42PM
(#9801334)
But the point of interning is that you're reducing the strings to atoms (perhaps represented as machine words such as pointers).
Whereas a prefix search says, no, the items are not atoms, they have a structure which we can divide into a prefix and as suffix, which are independently significant in some way that we need to search for one or the other.
If this is for the identifiers in a programming language which has some hacky reflection features (like iterate over all class methods that begin with "Get"---some aspect-oriented programming systems come to mind here) then it could help to have a fast prefix search (assuming the performance of that even matters).
Whereas a prefix search says, no, the items are not atoms, they have a structure which we can divide into a prefix and as suffix, which are independently significant in some way that we need to search for one or the other.
If this is for the identifiers in a programming language which has some hacky reflection features (like iterate over all class methods that begin with "Get"---some aspect-oriented programming systems come to mind here) then it could help to have a fast prefix search (assuming the performance of that even matters).