This may sound like a silly idea
It's been suggested previously.
Has anyone considered removing with the syntactic distinction between numeric and string indexing -- that is, between array and hash lookup?
Yes. We rejected the idea.
In particular, it would seem that %foo[$key] would be just as easy for the compiler to grok as %foo{$key}
Sure. But then is this: $ref[$key] an array or hash look-up??? Damian