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> tl;dr: PHP arrays are basically hash tables.

Weirder than that. They're ordered hash tables. The order of keys in a PHP array isn't arbitrary, like dictionaries/hashes/maps in various other languages; it's based on the order that keys are added, and can be explicitly manipulated with functions like ksort().

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Regarding the ordering, you can navigate hash tables in other languages similarly though, can't you?

Yes, e.g. in Ruby since 1.9, hash order is guaranteed.

Same in Python since 3.6 (2016)

Although the changes doc[1] states that dicts being ordered is an implementation detail that shouldn't be relied on. Nobody does of course ;)

[1] https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html#new-dict-imple...

As of Python 3.7, this is no longer an implementation detail and instead becomes a language feature.

Yep. In Next Generation Shell for example. At the time that the language was created, around 2013, it was clear to me (author of the language) that ordered traversal is beneficial and outweighs the downsides (memory usage).

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