Balanced trees

[Roy Smith]

In article <8761nmrnfk.fsf at elektro.pacujo.net>,
 Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:

> Anyway, this whole debate is rather unnecessary since every developer is
> supposed to have both weapons in their arsenal.

The problem with having a choice is that it opens up the possibility of 
making the wrong one :-)

As this discussion has shown, figuring out whether a hash table or a 
tree is better for a given problem is non-trivial.  My guess is that if 
you gave 1000 typical developers both data structures and let them pick 
freely, the number of cases where it really mattered and the developer 
picked the right one would be approximately equal to the number of cases 
where they picked the wrong one.