Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 March 2008 17:27:38 Alain Frisch wrote:
>> Patricia trees work fine when the set elements can easily be represented
>> as strings of bits.
>> ...
>>   structural equality = physical equality = set equality
> 
> This is very interesting. What are the disadvantages? I'm guessing: slow value 
> creation for small values and heavy memory consumption.

Regarding memory consumpion, it is true that hash-consing tables are
using memory, but sharing structurally equal values may also save some
space; see for instance the benchmarks on page 4 of
http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/ftp/publis/hash-consing2.ps

-- 
Jean-Christophe