[Python-ideas] Trie ABC?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Nick Coghlan writes:

 > I believe it is the extra trie specific method names that Geoffrey is
 > interested in standardising:

Understood.

 > This seems reasonable, although I think it may make more sense in
 > conjunction with a reference implementation in the standard library.

Reasonable in the abstract, yes.  But if it's possible to do as well
as timsort[1], IMHO providing an ABC rather than going directly to a
concrete implementation violates Occam's Razor.  All I want[2] here is
somebody to tell me that "no, trie cannot (at this time) be reduced to
a single algorithm that can be tuned to perform very well in almost
all cases encountered in practice, and it will be common for different
users[3] to want to implement different algorithms."

Footnotes: 
[1]  With all due respect to Tim, it's not "God's own sort".  But who
cares?<wink/>

[2]  Of course you can just ignore me. :-)

[3]  Who aren't graduate students writing a MS thesis on tries.