After more meditation I seem to have come to the same conclusion. An array (hashed or not...) is probably a better way to go for a couple of reasons.

1. It can contain more that a trit. ;-)
2. I can easily avoid assigning duplicates to the same slot.
3. Arrays are relatively easy to deal with.
4. Quicker to write.

I was just having a flashback to my computer science college days and thinking about other ways to store the data. I wouldn't mind dealving into the vec() bitwise operations evenutally, but I think I have convinced myself otherwise for this project.