I believe it is beneficial for a learner to see the other ways of thinking. While my remark was not focused on helping the inquirer to master binary searching it was aimed at helping her to get a broader view of the subject. I don't see why do you describe it as unhelpful.

The other points of you post are quite valid - but I did not write anything against them. I would just add to it that can use a tied hash to accomplish the goal of maintaining data in a binary tree, by using for example BerkeleyDB::Btree.