Being flexible and easy to code, this trick is pretty popular among the Romanian programming contests community.
Let’s check out a few problems.

Range Sum

h2. Range Sum

Given an n elements array, implement a data structure for point updates and range sum queries:
- set(i, x): a[i] := k,

This trick also works for other associative operations, like: min, gcd, product etc.

Nearest neighbour

h2. Nearest neighbour

Given a set S of n points and a query point p, find the point in S closest to p.