"Find a gap and fill it, I always say! My great-grand-uncle is the one who came up with disposible ketchup packets. Me, I found a data structure with O(sqrt) search time. Sure it doesn't have all the doohickeys of a Red-Black Tree, it's not as quick on the insert as a radix - but at the end of the day it gets the job done. And to some people, that's all that matters..."