[acbellini]

I have reported the "try" pronunciation because that's the way I have learnt them, and also because that's how Sedgewick's book explicitly uses, but I guess there are alternatives :-)

Anyway, you just got right the point that I was trying to make, a trie is definitely not a general purpouse data structure, but for the specific case (limited number of elements, many common prefixes etc) it performs very well. As for the point of returning the original object, it suffices to store the original object in end-word nodes. I didn't do that in this code because it would have added unnecessary code, since the problem was really just membership and prefixes.

In the specific case, hashtable wouldn't have worked, since it's not sorted and it doesn't solve the original problem.