How easy are strings and associative arrays in Fortran? My experience working with particle physics code (which is generally C++) is that we could probably mak

How easy are strings and associative arrays in Fortran? My experience working with particle physics code (which is generally C++) is that we could probably make it a lot faster if we completely banned the use of `std::map<std::string, T>`. But since it's there, and since people use it to e.g. look for files or parse configuration, you often find an API that accesses elements in an array by string rather than by index. Sure, it just made your code 20x slower, but it's only one part of much bigger framework and this wasn't on the "hot path" anyway, so you just use it. Rinse and repeat a thousand times, you can see how things slow down a bit.