Are you advocating the style commonly seen in PHP programming?
$a = array();
$a[0] = 'foo';
$a[1] = 'bar';
/* Fine, $a is an integer-indexed array. */
$a['another metasyntactic variable'] = 'quux';
/* Is $a an array (vector) or a hash table? I'm confused. */
for ($i = 0; $i < 3; $i++) {
echo $a[$i];
}
/* Oops, we looped one too many. No, wait, this prints:
* foo bar quux
* Huh?
*/
(PHP automatically assigns as the numerical index the maximum numerical index plus one to the "hash value".)
Hash tables and arrays/vectors are two entirely different concepts. Please do not confuse them with each other.
PHP's brokenness doesn't mean Arc has to imitate it. You'd get a vector up until the $a['another metasyntactic variable'] line, at which point it would turn into a hash table with two integer keys and one string key. Asking for $a[2] would always either return nil or throw an exception regardless of whether it was a hash table or a vector at the time.
