It's as if they thought it through.

I wonder why we have separate arrays and hashes in Perl. Other languages don't do it. After all, the principal difference between an array and a hash is that an array references its items by ordinal position and hashes use strings to name them. A hash could surely be conflated with an array simply by using integers as the string keys - especially since Perl can use strings and integers interchangeably.

We would have to make changes, but all it would really need is a way of detecting when the user intended to use an ordinal array and when the user intended to use an associative array. This should be easy enough: all we need to do is check whether all the keys are sequential and start at zero, and we know it's an ordinal array. To accommodate the fact this may be a coincidence, we can create a second set of functions so that the user can specify that even though the array appears to be ordinal it is actually just that the keys happen to be numeric and happen to be in order starting from zero. We'd also have to change the way sort works, in fact creating two functions: one function that orders an ordinal array and re-creates the keys when the values are in their new positions, and one function that, having sorted the array by value, makes sure the keys still refer to the same value. Of course, sorting integers as strings returns a different order from sorting integers as integers ('10' is alphabetically between '1' and '2'), so we would need a keys function that knew whether to return strings or integers so that we know, when sorting the list of keys, whether to sort them as strings or integers.

Splicing would also require two functions, of course. It doesn't really make sense to splice a nominal array because there is no inherent order to it; but since a fundamental tenet of structural programming is that if you make two things the same, you must treat them the same, then we have to make it make sense. Since splicing is all about removing things by their position (it's very easy to remove a key from a nominal array: just remove it), we need to give associative arrays an internal order. Or possibly just whinge when we use a thing that doesn't look like an ordinal array in splice, thereby affirming a difference between ordinal and associative arrays that we are desperately trying to pretend doesn't exist.

We'd also have to determine what to do when, for example, someone creates an entry in an array by giving it an ordinal position that doesn't exist. Do we create an array of suitable length and fill it with bits of emptiness in order to maintain the illusion that this array is ordinal? Or do we create it as an associative array with a single numerical key? What happens if someone creates key [2], then key [0], then key [1]? Do we sneakily go back and pretend we knew they meant this to be an ordinal array from the beginning, or do we treat this as an associative array and annoy the hell out of the user, who expected an ordinal array with three entries?

And then finally an extra function is needed so that we can refer to elements by their ordinal position even if it's not a real ordinal position: after all, -1 is a valid associative array key but in an ordinal array it means "the last element" like it does in common C functions like substr, so we'd have to create a way of referencing the array backwards without accidentally confusing a negative index with a string key.

Oh yes. That's why.

Further reading

Here's a Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory — if anyone can find TimToady's paper on this on the interwebs, I'd like to link to that from here too, so I'd be grateful for that.