This is an interesting point. I guess it's due to the performance as well as the ease. I have used prefix trie for autocomplete, but even then i was using hasht

This is an interesting point. I guess it's due to the performance as well as the ease. I have used prefix trie for autocomplete, but even then i was using hashtables internally. I also use alot of javascript, and there it is natural to use sparse arrays, which wind up being hashtables. iterating over these can be an issue though, so i have found that combining the hashtable with a linked list results in the best performance.