(no title)
rcyeh | 1 month ago
I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.
I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.
More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.
quietbritishjim|1 month ago
Associative array is just a fancy term for map / dictionary. C++ has always had one of those, even before TR1: std::map (which is a tree under the hood). It does have the extra requirement that your key be ordered, which isn't part of the core definition of associate array[1]. But usually it's not a problem even if you don't actually need the ordering.
As I think you're implying, TR1 / C++11 added std::unordered_map, which is a hash table and doesn't need keys to be ordered (just hashable).
[1] It isn't part of the core definition of "map" either, which despite C++'s usage just means the same thing as dictionary / associative array. A lot of those early STL containers are confusingly named: e.g., in general, "list" just means some ordered sequence of elements, so it covers static arrays, dynamic arrays, and linked lists, but C++ uses this term for linked lists, probably the least likely understood meaning. It use of the term "vector" for contiguous dynamic arrays is very odd. But I'm now way off topic...