I'll admit to not having looked at it for about 12 years, and, of course, I'm not saying I couldn't figure out after 2-3 minutes over looking over the pattern,

I'll admit to not having looked at it for about 12 years, and, of course, I'm not saying I couldn't figure out after 2-3 minutes over looking over the pattern, but it just never flowed the way it did with Python for me. data ={} data['foo']= [ {'bar':10,'baz':12}, {'bar':20,'baz':13}, {'bar':30,'baz':14} ] print data['foo'][2]['bar'] data['foo'].append({'bar':40,'baz':15}) for x in data['foo']: print x['bar'] Maybe it had something to do with indices always being [] brackets and {} only being used to define the dict structure. Or maybe it got easier sometime in the last 12 years? Or, maybe you could onto something, and having come pre-primed with knowledge hashes/arrays, I just picked up python more quickly. Anyways, it was just a personal story told as well as I could remember it.