unless the list is regularly pruned to remove elements with duplicate keys, multiple values associated with the same key will increase the size of the list, and thus the time to search, without providing any compensatory advantage.

One advantage of association lists is that a new element can be added in constant time. Additionally, when the number of keys is very small, searching an association list may be more efficient than searching a binary search tree or hash table, because of the greater simplicity of their implementation.

Applications and software libraries

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