Indeed, but it took a while for me to appreciate Tries.
Originally, i thought "nice idea", but I rarely ever encountered a problem where I really needed a prefix tree.
But while reading into HAMT and Clojure's datastructure implementations, it dawned on me that prefix trees aren't only useful for strings (or arbitrary byte sequences): Hashes in a dictionary, for example, are sequences of bits, too. And the design of a HAMT is exactly such that it doesn't concern itself with bytes but any blocks of N bits (determined by the branching factor; i.e. a factor of 32 implies 6-bit-blocks). And if you know the length of each sequence (hash), you know the maximum Trie depth, which also works for you, not against you.
Originally, i thought "nice idea", but I rarely ever encountered a problem where I really needed a prefix tree.
But while reading into HAMT and Clojure's datastructure implementations, it dawned on me that prefix trees aren't only useful for strings (or arbitrary byte sequences): Hashes in a dictionary, for example, are sequences of bits, too. And the design of a HAMT is exactly such that it doesn't concern itself with bytes but any blocks of N bits (determined by the branching factor; i.e. a factor of 32 implies 6-bit-blocks). And if you know the length of each sequence (hash), you know the maximum Trie depth, which also works for you, not against you.
That was rather eye opening for me at the time.