Anyone who has implemented a collection has faced the dilemma of what to return to the user to indicate a search failure. Traditionally, C programmers would return either some kind of enumerated error code, though more often th

Ah tries, the tree structure with a name that nobody can agree on how to pronounce. Oddly spelled name aside, Tries offer a convenient way to implement a collection of strings in a way which supports operations such as finding

Sometimes when I'm bored I reach for one of the various books of programming challenges, flip to a random page and work through random problems until I've had enough. This past weekend I flipped to a random page and was greeted