John Brock wrote in a message he forwarded:
[...]
My suggestion is that by using a different syntax you can always
look at any array as a hash.
[and vice versa, by mapping a hash to a sequential list as key1, value1,
key2, value2, ...]
A hash datatype requires a new operator to access the hash keys (so
afaics it's possible to avoid different braces per Axel's preference,
but /something/ new has to be added). John's idea of two indexing
bracing styles achieves this, but interspersing the hash values with the
keys as part of a get-keys operator is redundant.
Another possible get-keys operator is a modified prefix, e.g. @ rather
than $ - so @hash[1] would return the first key and @hash[count $hash]
would return the last. This has the advantage of being able to access
the entire key list using @hash, which can be passed as an argument to a
for loop or to echo or printf. The alternative indexing operator could
achieve this through something like {*} for all values and [EMAIL PROTECTED] for all
keys, but this is less intuitive and not backward-compatible with
existing syntax, since $hash unadorned would return keys as well as values.
IME the mapping that John describes is rarely used. So supporting it in
the get-keys operator doesn't warrant the inconvenience of having only
odd-index access to the list of hash keys, and losing backward
compatibility with the meaning of unadorned $array.
[...]
The advantage to all this is that you don't have to introduce a
new data type for hashes,
PHP supports a similar data type to that previously discussed on this
list - an array that may be indexed traditionally (numeric keys) or as a
hash aka map (string keys) using the same indexing operators []. This
seems to be compatible with the model John suggests for the hash
indexing operators {}.
array_keys($hash) in PHP corresponds to @hash as described above.
There's no direct counterpart to @hash[index] in PHP - it can be
achieved through: $keys = array_keys($hash); $keys[index].
[...]
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