Re: Are Associative Arrays unique to Perl?

The ICI language has a similar construct. What it calls a "struct" is
really a dictionary object, a collection of key/value pairs that may
be arbitrary objects. As in Lisp strings are "atomic" and have a
unique address in the interpreter's address space (as can all
objects). Unlike the SNOBOL array implementation ICI uses a hash table
for the finding the key/value pair. This mechanism is used to
implement ICI's "scope" structures that store variables and their
values (struct objects also have a chain of "super" structs to form a
scope hierarchy). It works very nicely and allows all sorts of "map"
data structures to be declared and accessed via the (native- code)
hash table lookup.


--
Andy Newman <andy@research.canon.com.au>
--

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