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In computer science, an associative array, map, symbol table, or dictionary is an abstract data type that stores a collection of (key, value) pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection. In mathematical terms, an associative array is a function with finite domain. [1] It supports 'lookup', 'remove', and 'insert ...
Perl 5 has built-in, language-level support for associative arrays. Modern Perl refers to associative arrays as hashes; the term associative array is found in older documentation but is considered somewhat archaic. Perl 5 hashes are flat: keys are strings and values are scalars.
Perl programmers may initialize a hash (or associative array) from a list of key/value pairs. If the keys are separated from the values with the => operator (sometimes called a fat comma), rather than a comma, they may be unquoted (barewords [5]). The following lines are equivalent:
An associative array stores a set of (key, value) pairs and allows insertion, deletion, and lookup (search), with the constraint of unique keys. In the hash table implementation of associative arrays, an array A {\displaystyle A} of length m {\displaystyle m} is partially filled with n {\displaystyle n} elements, where m ≥ n {\displaystyle m ...
Perl takes hashes ("associative arrays") from AWK and regular expressions from sed. These simplify many parsing, text-handling, and data-management tasks. Shared with Lisp is the implicit return of the last value in a block, and all statements are also expressions which can be used in larger expressions themselves. [citation needed]
The disadvantage of association lists is that the time to search is O(), where n is the length of the list. [3] For large lists, this may be much slower than the times that can be obtained by representing an associative array as a binary search tree or as a hash table.
In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x) will result in an array y whose elements are sine of the corresponding elements of the array x. Vectorized index operations are also supported.
There is also the issue of printing the result in base ten, for human consideration. Because the base is already ten, the result could be shown simply by printing the successive digits of array digit, but they would appear with the highest-order digit last (so that 123 would appear as "321"). The whole array could be printed in reverse order ...