>I remember getting into programming even in the 1990s and I can tell you a lot of the C world would still consider associative data structures like a hash tabl

>I remember getting into programming even in the 1990s and I can tell you a lot of the C world would still consider associative data structures like a hash table something to be a bit exotic and only to be pulled out if you had no other choice. It was very easy to not be very up to date on these things. That's a little surprising, considering that the classic first book about C, K&R was first published in 1978 and again in 1988, the first and second edition, respectively. One of the editions, maybe the first, had a simple hash table implementation, that just summed up the ASCII values of the characters in the given string, modulo some value, and used that as the key for the string being hashed. . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language