Trie memory

Trie memory is a way of storing and retrieving information. ~ It is applicable to information that consists of function-argument (or item-term) pairs--information conventionally stored in unordered lists, ordered lists, or pigeonholes. The main advantages of trie memory over the other memoIw plans just mentioned are shorter access time, greater ease of addition or up-dating, greater convenience in handling arguments of diverse lengths, and the ability to take advantage of redundancies in the information stored. The main disadvantage is relative inefficiency in using storage space, but this inefficiency is not great when the store is large. In this paper several paradigms of trie memory are described and compared with other memory paradigms, their advantages and disadvantages are examined in detail, and applications are discussed. Many essential features of trie memory were mentioned by de la Briandais [1] in a paper presented to the Western Joint Computer Conference in 1959. The present development is essentially independent of his, having been described in memorandum form in January 1959 [2], and it is fuller in that it considers additional paradigms (finitedimensional trie memories) and includes experimental results bearing on the efficiency of utilization of storage space.