>unless, of course, your language has some kind of preposterously verbose associative array constructor syntax, like PHP does array( => , => , ...) is "prepost

>unless, of course, your language has some kind of preposterously verbose associative array constructor syntax, like PHP does array( => , => , ...) is "preposterously verbose? You should see some other languages for the "preposterously" part. Plus 5.4 has short array syntax.