Arrays: new and old keys, i

[John Vokey]

Thank you all, for this discussion.  Really.  It was more informative  
than the release notes could even hope to be.  The exemplars of why  
the new array features were so obviously useful helped me a lot in  
exactly one way: I have no idea what you who promote these ``new''  
features are on about.  Opaque doesn't begin to describe my  
appreciation of your views on these ``new'' features.  Admittedly, I  
have only been programming in everything from machine code through  
every passing fad since the 1960s, so I may be either dated or  
stunned.  But, really, I just don't get it.  Again, I ask, what have  
we gained by the ``new'' array features, besides more brackets?   
Setting fred[z] to empty does not seem to me to be a major  
advancement.  Or, at least not one that is at best a trivial change.

Telling me that you can now set orange to apple does not help except  
in light of how anyone could not do so before.  As far as I can see  
nothing prevented anyone from doing so in the old array system.  So,  
please, please, help me.  I am usually the first to jump on the newest  
and latest, but these new array referencing functions leave me non- 
plussed.

And they still suffer from an old incongruity that I have complained  
about for years:
array[fred] differs if fred has been previously defined (i.e., has  
content), in which case the content (value?) of array[fred] is the  
value(fred) of array; otherwise it is the literal fred of array.


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-Dr. John R. Vokey