ECMAscript already tried this.
Bad idea.
If your hash keys happen to look like large numbers (e.g. you
have 7-digit product codes) as soon as you store one of them, it says:
"Oh, this looks like a number, so we'll store it like an array" and
happily creates a million empty array entries for you.
~ John Williams
On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> This may sound like a silly idea but ...
>
> Has anyone considered removing with the syntactic distinction between
> numeric and string indexing -- that is, between array and hash lookup?
>
> In particular, it would seem that
>
> %foo[$key]
>
> would be just as easy for the compiler to grok as
>
> %foo{$key}
>
> but would mean that we could stop worrying about the precedence of
> postfix/infix "{", and things like
>
> if %test { $count++ }
>
> would not require whitespace before the "{" to be disambiguated.
>
> I don't have a complete solution as anonymous array and hash construction would
> still need different syntaces, but has anyone else thought about this?
>
> - Martin
>
>
