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Comment by spitfire | Hacker News Reader

How about hashmaps, something like records and other constructs for building large, long lived applications.

I'd kill for hashmaps, some sort of records and strong typing in Mathematica.

Here are your hashmaps:

Awesome. Is this a new thing? I can't find it in the Mathematica 9 documentation.

So now there's just strong types and something like records left for me for general purpose development.

They've existed in a significantly more powerful form as DownValues since Mathematica's release.

what's wrong with just using

    obj["a"] = 1;
    obj["b"] = 2;
    Print[obj["a"]]

    obj = { "a" -> 1, "b" -> 2 };
    Print["a" /. obj]

?

Because those are really poor substitutes for Associations, though one can make do.