C# Binary Trees and Dictionaries

Question

I\'m struggling with the concept of when to use binary search trees and when to use dictionaries.

In my application I did a little experiment which used the C5 libra

Answer 1

The interface for a Tree and a Hash table (which I'm guessing is what your Dictionary is based one) should be very similar. Always revolving around keyed lookups.

I had always thought a Dictionary was better for creating things once and then then doing lots of lookups on it. While a Tree was better if you were modifying it significantly. However, I don't know where I picked that idea up from.

(Functional languages often use trees as the basis for they collections as you can re-use most of the tree if you make small modifications to it).