[Tutor] object representation

[Lie Ryan]

On 03/05/2010 12:45 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> E.g. a trie needs six pointers just to represent the single 
> key "python":
> 
> '' -> 'p' -> 'y' -> 't' -> 'h' -> 'o' -> 'n'
> 
> while a hash table uses just one:
> 
> -> 'python'

You can argue that had trie beed used as the datatype, there will
actually be no need to store the key's string representation; the index
of the object in the trie implies the textual representation. Such that,
you will still need 6 pointers, but you won't need to store a string
object. It will just be:

'' -> ptrP -> ptrY -> ptrT -> ptrH -> ptrO -> ptrN

and if for some reason the name is needed (perhaps for debugging?); then
there could be an algorithm to reverse-map the ptrXs to char. I can
imagine that to be implementable if variable names in python be limited
to alphanumerics only and probably a select few of symbols. Unicode
names makes things difficult though...