Two different kinds of arrays

I hate the term "associative array".
I know it's supposed to be helpful: it's just like a hash, only with strings as indexes instead of numbers.
But it always seems to confuse students.
Hashes are the cornerstone of most Perl programs: they give you sets, tables, indexes, counters, ....
Because of hashes we don't write B trees, AVL trees, B*trees, red-black trees.

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YAPC 2000: Stages of a Perl Programmer - 14